UnNews:Scientists calculate one third to record number of decimal places

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

25 October 2009

Ever since Aristotle first proposed a formula for finding the decimal value of a third, scientists have been competing to see just who has the longer digit.

TSUKUBA, Japan - Forget "0.33", Japanese researchers have recently calculated the decimal value of 1/3 to 2.5 trillion decimal places.

The team, headed by professor Daisuke Takahashi, used the T2K Open Supercomputer, a massive parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer located at the University of Tsukuba’s Center for Computational Sciences. The T2K is capable of 95.4 trillion floating point operations per second, and only took 73 hours and 36 minutes longer than this to calculate a third to 2.5 trillion decimal places, more than doubling the previous record.

"Our primary objective was to test the speed and reliability of our supercomputer," Takahashi stated, "And this was obviously the best way to do that". He also created the equations used in the calculation, "Essentially I divided one by three."

We cannot print out all 2,576,980,377,524 digits discovered, as it would take approximately 73 million A4 pages to do so, but we can tell you that the last digit is a "3".

Unfortunately, as this is a new world record, there is no possible way to verify the answer, and thus it may be entirely wrong.

A sample of the record-breaking answer.

Sources

• Joshua Williams "Japanese supercomputer calculates Pi to record 2.5 trillion digits" The Examiner, August 18, 2009