TOKYO (Dec. 6) - A team of researchers at a leading national university
have set a world record by calculating the value of pi to 1.24 trillion
places, one of the researchers said Friday.
Professor Yasumasa Kanada and nine other researchers at the Information
Technology Center at Tokyo University calculated the value for pi with
a Hitachi supercomputer over 400 hours in September, project team member
Makoto Kudo said.
The new calculation is more than six times the number of places in the
record currently recognized by Guinness World Records - 206.158 billion
places - which Kanada also helped calculate in 1999.
``We would need to verify it, but it sounds like Professor Kanada has
broken his own record,'' Guinness World Records spokesman Neil Hayes
said. He said a Guinness math expert would need to verify the data.
Kanada's team spent five years designing the program used in the
September experiment, Kudo said.
The Hitachi supercomputer is capable of 2 trillion calculations per
second, or twice as fast as the one used for the current Guinness record
calculation.
Pi, usually given as 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the
diameter of a circle and has an infinite number of decimal places.
Such an extremely precise calculation of the figure isn't necessary for
any practical scientific use, but researchers say it contributes to
improving scientific calculation methods.
12/06/02 10:42 EST
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