Pencils down, everyone. IBM’s “BlueGene/P” supercomputer has beaten you to the sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared after very few months — at one quadrillion calculations per second. Running thousands of independent processors, the number-crunching monster accomplished what would have taken a single CPU 1,500 years. A cloud-computing effort last year calculated Pi itself out to the two-quadrillionth digit , but you’re able to wonder why this all matters. “What’s interesting in these computations is that until a number of years ago, it was widely believed that such mathematical objects were forever beyond the reach of human reasoning or machine computation,” said one researcher, “Again we see the utter futility in placing limits on human ingenuity and technology.” So there’s that. But in the entire commotion nobody seems to have announced whether the landmark digit was a one or a nil: all you betting at the outcome should dig deeper into the source link.
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