Pi

You might be a geek if…

  • You have ever sat in front of your computer, at 1am, staring at a real-time graph of your CPU usage, looking for patterns as your computer calculates pi to the 1 billionth digit.
  • With your brother
  • And liked it

So as we speak, my computer is busy calculating pi to the billionth digit. Is that exciting or what? I know, I can hardly contain myself.

Actually, truth be told, I am kind of excited about it. This is a sort of test run to see what my computer is capable of. Next I plan on getting pi to the 10 billionth digit, simply because the largest one you can download is 4.2 billion. Why, you ask? So I can have pi to the 10 billionth digit on my computer…. duh.

So the file is gonna be a little bit… enormous. 10GB at least. one byte for every digit. That’s bigger than an entire movie in divx format. That’s more than a CD full of music… and this is all just text. I want to make it avaliable on my website, but that’d be a little rediculous. It would use up 10 months of bandwidth allowance just to download it once! So instead, I’ll probably just do something simple, like display the first 10,000 digits or so.

I can see Rachel right now… head in her hands, wondering what she was thinking when she said yes. I’m not sure she realized just how much of a geek I am. I mean… math excites me… how much more geeky do you get?

I also learned today how they figure out pi. To make a long and confusing story shorter and only slightly confusing…

They take a circle with a 1 unit radius, and put a polygon (square, hexagon, etc…) inside of it. They figure out the area of that polygon and say “Pi is obviously bigger than that number (because the polygon fit inside the circle).” Then they take the same type of polygon and put it outside the circle and say “Pi must be smaller than that number (because the circle fit inside the polygon).” Then, the more sides the polygon has, the more accurate it is, because the more like a circle it is (Think of a hexagon versus a 100 sided polygon). So to figure out pi to the whatever-trillionth-digit-they’ve-figured-it-out-to, a computer just figures for a gajillion-sided polygon that fits inside and outside the 1 unit circle, and figures out what size would fit inside it.

So I’m sure I could explain it better in person, but I doubt any of you care.

Alright, I’m going to bed. It’s later than late.

10 Responses to “Pi”

  1. TJ Says:

    so steve you got me intrested in PI so i went out and found a program and did a run and here is my results

    Program : PiFast version 4.3 (fix 1), by Xavier Gourdon
    Computation of 100000000 digits of Pi
    Method used : Chudnovsky
    Size of FFT : 8192 K
    Physical memory used : ~ 525521 K
    Disk memory used : ~ 0.00 Meg
    ————————————————————
    Computation run information :

    Start : Fri Nov 25 20:14:39 2005
    End : Fri Nov 25 20:39:18 2005
    Duration : 1479.32 seconds
    ============================================================
    Total computation time : 1479.32 seconds (~ 0.41 hours)
    ============================================================
    Pi with 100000000 digits

  2. Justin Says:

    Wait a minute!!!!! She said yes?! To What?! Are You two getting married?!

  3. Stevish Says:

    Woah there, sparky! The girl has to say ‘yes’ to more than just a proposal to marriage. Dating is what she said yes to.

  4. rae Says:

    Acctually, the whole “you acctually like math” thing is quite convinient for me. Let’s just suffice it to say that math is the one thing that I’ve always royally sucked at, not a little bit sucked, royally. So you’re pretty much perfect.

    By the way, the reason I’m leaving a comment on an old post is cuz I typed my name into your search bar to see what would happen. And here I am. Your xanga looks good too.

  5. veggieskater Says:

    Where can I download 4.2 Billion Digits of Pi??….

    ………anyone??

  6. veggieskater Says:

    never mind I found it!!

  7. pi man Says:

    lol i feel nerdy going on this website (:-B)

  8. Here is what Lomoco Says:

    Where can I view that? THat would be interesting. I have found it to like the 4 millionth, but not to the billionth.

  9. Caroline "Flamesstar" Says:

    ong im an almost geek! olny i dont do that at 1am…
    and im not as bigg of a geek as my friend who knows pi the the 100th desimal point…well i love pi!

  10. Caroline Says:

    by the way you can find pi to the 4millionth if you look it up on google! i was an idiot and i copied it and attached to an email to the friend that i told you abot b4 and it toook forever and i relized that i could have sent the link…
    P.S. im a math geek not a spelling geek!

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