Yahoo researcher Nicolas Sze determines the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of the mathematical constant pi

September 17th, 2010 - 9:13 pm ICT by Aishwarya Bhatt  

New York, Sep 17 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The real figure of pi has often been debated among scientists and Mathematicians. 

A researcher who works for Yahoo, Mr. Nicholas Sze has worked out the 2 trillionth digit of pi and says when it is expressed in binary then it is 0. 



Mr. Sze spent 23 days with 1,000 Yahoo computers to complete the calculations. He used Google developed logic, MapReduce to aid in his calculation.

The MapReduce approach is used to divide major tasks into smaller manageable tasks that will eventually be put together to get the final result. The calculation returns just a specific digit of the pi constant. 



A different approach was used in January to extract the first 2.7 trillion digits of the pi constant and Mr. Sze explains that his single digit extraction is different from extracting all the digits. He said getting the full digits of the pi can be useful in other fields but he said his technique is much important in cryptography, physics and data mining.

“Interestingly, by some algebraic manipulations, (our) formula can compute pi with some bits skipped; in other words, it allows computing specific bits of pi,” according to Mr. Sze. He also said that his calculation has already been used to compare the processor performance of Yahoo’s clusters.

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