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.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 2:24 am and is filed under Babblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.