![]() While breaking the record may be one of the key motivators for finding new digits of pi, there are two other important benefits. The first is the development and testing of supercomputers and new high-precision multiplication algorithms. Optimising the computation of pi leads to computer hardware and software that benefit many other areas of our lives, from accurate weather forecasting to DNA sequencing and even COVID modelling. The latest computation of pi was 3.5 times as fast as the previous effort, despite the extra 12 trillion decimal places – an impressive increase in supercomputing performance in just 18 months. ![]() The second is the exploration of the very nature of pi. Despite centuries of research, there are still fundamental unanswered questions about the way its digits behave. ![]() It is conjectured that pi is a “normal” number, meaning all possible sequences of digits should appear equally often.įor example, we expect the digit 3 to appear as often as the digit 8, and the digit string “12345” to appear as often as “99999”. But we don’t even know if each decimal digit appears infinitely often in pi, let alone whether there are more complex patterns waiting to be discovered. The data for the new pi computation have not yet been released, as the researchers are awaiting confirmation from the Guinness Book of Records. But we hope there will be many mathematically interesting treasures within the numbers. We will never “finish” computing the digits of pi - there will always be more to find and new records to break.
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