TOKYO (AP) — 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 today.
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.
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.