Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits

My roommate in college had, while in high school, gone for a Guinness World Record memorizing the number of digits in pi. He memorized them out to 800 or so, then discovered another had memorized it to thousands, so he gave up.

In college, he figured out how to write a program to compute an arbitrary number of the digits of Pi. I asked him how did he know it was correct? He said "just look at it. The digits are right!"

We were limited in the use of the campus PDP-10 by a CPU time allotment per semester. He was planning to blow his allotment computing pi, he figured he could compute it to 15,000 digits or so. At the end of the term, he fired it up to run overnight.

The PDP-10 crashed sometime in the early morning, and his allotment was used up and had no results! He just laughed and gave up the quest.

Later on, Caltech lifted the limits on PDP-10 usage. Which was a good thing, because Empire consumed a lot of CPU resources :-/

This new pi value should land us on the precise nanometer on a planetary rock of a sun located some 18 trillion light years away.

More than good enough for a Star Trek transporter targeting system, provided that sufficient power can reach it and able to compensate for planetary orbital speed, orbital curvature, surface axial rate, as well same value set for its solar system pathway around its galaxy, and its galaxy pathway thru its eyewatery cornucopia of galaxies.

But it may not be good enough for precise calculation of field interaction within a large group of elementary particles of quantum physics. Thanks to Heisenburg’s Indeterminacy Principle (aka Uncertainty Principle).

But why? Serious question. I'm sure something interesting/useful might come out of it, and even if it doesn't just go for it, but is there any mathematical truth that can be gleaned by calculating pi to more and more digits?

As pi never repeats itself, that also means that every piece of conceivable information (music, movies, texts) is in there, encoded. So as we have so many pieces of pi now, we could create a file sharing system that's not based on sharing the data, but the position of a piece of the file in pi. That would be kinda funny

Even NASA doesn't need to use more than 17 digits, more than enough to slice an atom into half across the entire universe.

I'm curious what the longest string of digits of PI embedded in that is (and what the most efficient algorithm for finding it would be).

Any signs of Sagan's conjectured graffiti yet? E.g. pictures of circles?

Why go through all that effort, when it's just tau/2.

Is it possible to find a certain encoded formula of PI inside the PI digits itself, given its length?

Have they empirically checked that there is no pattern reproduction or just going by the proof? I imagine since this is the largest we've calculated to you could also empirically check the proof to confirm accuracy.

How do they verify that because even if it’s as simple as addition, you may have hardware anomalies that appears, just look at divisions and floating points weirdness on certain hardware

I've never understood why people have such a hard-on for the digits of pi.

I've met more than one pi braggart who expected me to marvel at their ability to recite digits, but couldn't answer 'what is pi though? Don't use numbers, use words'. And they just didn't know.

It's one of those weird domains we're people can possess deep knowledge and no understanding.

This reminds me I've been curious to know what Hackernews people walk around with. I memorized 18 digits of Pi in highschool that I still remember and sometimes use as a bad joke here and there. But curious how many digits people here walk around remembering, specially if you aren't into competitively doing it (which I found out later is a thing).

Nice achievement but always a bit disappointing that those records are based on throwing more money at the problem, rather than new theoretical grounds, or software improvements (IIRC y-cruncher is not open source).

Anyone else thinking a few nodes of those servers with their drool-worthy 60TB ssds in a HA environment would be really really awesome to play with and run infra on so I could go back to not worrying about cloud spend and just focus on cool and fun stuff?

I guess they were sponsored by their hardware manufacturers, on the condition that they mentioned their name once for every trillionth digit of pi they computed.

I can understand that they have to mention them, but I think they’re overdoing it.

I know human curiosity is a big reason why we pursue hard things in life. But can anyone tell me why this specific problem has been pushed to such limits. What is the utility here?

202 trillion digits of pi. Maybe someday I will be able to use this exact calculation to do something useful. Just need 61TB of memory or disk space to store the constant

Are there well interesting formulas where PI is potentiated? This would affect the importance of the precision of PI's digits if i understand correctly.

And on only 2400 watts too. Impressive.

They need to keep going. I heard there's a surprise about 10^20 digits in.

I was shopping for a storage array last year, and was impressed by the IBM FlashSystem, which can stuff about 1.8PB (raw) into a 4U enclosure using forty-eight 38.4TB FlashCore modules.

StorageReview's server is a different beast, but it's kind of amazing that it gets similar capacity in only 2U.

It’s way to dismiss this as useless. But, I feel like doing this work must have yielded some interesting second-order tools or realizations.

So, does anybody know what interesting discoveries have come out of this process, besides a more precise Pi?

Did you write down all the digits? Excellent.

Meh. About as useless as blockchain, I guess.

If we are all living in a simulation there may have been an extremely stressed cosmic sys admin racing to make sure we did not get into an overflow situation.