Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Having His Pi And Eating It Too

Well done, sir:

Shigeru Kondo, a 55-year-old systems engineer for a food company based in northern Japan, easily surpassed the previous record of 2.7 trillion digits, set late last year by a French engineer.

The calculation of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter - usually abbreviated to 3.14 - took 90 days and seven hours, according to the Kyodo news agency...

Mr Kondo's computer cost Y1.5 million (£11,550) to build and has a hard-drive capacity of 32 terabytes. He plans to apply to the Guinness Book of Records for recognition of his achievement...

Mr Kondo's wife, Yukiko, 53, complained that the computer used up a lot of energy during the three-month project and increased the electricity bill to Y20,000 (£154) a month.
Hat tip to reader MikeAT.
at

4 comments:

  1. Mike Thiac4:34 AM

    Darren

    It's stories like this that make me feel good....damned, I thought I had no life :<)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous8:26 AM

    I think we can also use (somehow) the BBP approach to verify arbitrary parts of his calculation. That would be nice.

    -Mark Roulo

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:43 AM

    Yep, you can use BBP to verify the decimal result:

    bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pipcrecord.pdf

    In fact, this is what the 2.7T digits guy in France did.

    -Mark R.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8:48 AM

    Yep, Kondo used BBP to verify his result, too.

    http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-5t/announce_en.html

    -Mark Roulo

    ReplyDelete