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105 Trillion Pi Digits: The Journey to a New Pi Calculation Record
(www.storagereview.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Technology
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We’re already past the point where calculating more digits of pi is either interesting or useful. The formula for calculating pi is well known, so at this point all it is is how much compute power and time can you throw at the infinite series equation.
Pi is only useful for practical purposes out to around 21 digits — with that many digits you can calculate the diameter of the entire universe down to an accuracy of a single electron. Anything more has no real practical benefits. Even NASA only uses 16 digits of Pi for any calculation in-solar system; anything more is just burning compute power (and possibly running into issues with floating point rounding issues) for no additional benefit.
Ten years from now when computers are significantly more powerful, someone will break this record for the lulz.
Knowing the answer isn't really useful - for reasons you've pointed out - and setting records like this is always just done for the publicity (if you wanted more digits, you can just keep the system running the calculations for longer).
Doing the calculations themselves does have some uses though - it turns out that its actually pretty hard to find problems that can totally saturate the CPUs of high performance systems for long enough that you can see rare issues that only occur under significant load.
For high end compute stuff, you need a task that you can run in parallel across hundreds or thousands of machines, that isn't going to be bottlenecked by I/O easily, and where the results are easily verifiable - so you know the performance and reliability characteristics of your system before you commision it to run real work (where you operating costs might be $10k/hour+, and there is a large queue of work waiting to go)
There are some araffed groups that plan to push the calculation even further. In 5 years theyll double the digits.
There is that word again. That's the second time I have seen it and the second time that the context has baffled me.
Google it. It only comes up in AI text. OP is probably a bot. "Araffed" isn't a real word, it's hallucinated. Every search result is basically "what is 'araffed' and why does AI produce images using this fake word?".
https://nation.cymru/culture/the-hilarious-explanation-for-araf-on-welsh-roads/
Hmm, interesting.
According to Wolfram alpha, diameter of electron divided by diameter of the universe is 3.2*10^42
Pretty sure 21 digits is not enough. More like 42 digits
Ah yes, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.
How many digits of pi are necessary to calculate the diameter of the visible universe to within the diameter of a single electron?
It being the same number as some book is just a coincidence, but if the difference in size between universe and an electron is 10^42, then you literally need 42 digits of pi too.