[46563] in Cypherpunks
Re: Representations of Pi, etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Monta)
Fri Jan 5 13:59:49 1996
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 04 Jan 1996 23:45:00 PST."
<ad11fe741202100469b4@[205.199.118.202]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 1996 10:50:47 -0800
From: Peter Monta <pmonta@qualcomm.com>
Tim May writes:
> > [ individual bits of pi ]
>
> I didn't see this result you mention, but it surprises me. The part about
> how it works in some bases, but not in decimal.
It's an open question as to whether there's a version that works
in base 10. There's a nice summary at
"http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/plouffe/plouffe.html".
> In summary, I would be surprised to find that a method for calculating the
> Nth digit of pi works for base N but not for base M (modulo some minor
> efficiency factors related to machine architecture, etc.).
It does seem strange, but radix conversion can be much more expensive
than the baseline algorithm. I vaguely remember hearing that
the billion-digit pi computations done with AGM techniques haven't
dealt with base 10 recently.
Cheers,
Peter Monta pmonta@qualcomm.com
Qualcomm, Inc./Globalstar
