🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7kss7t$522$1@fu-berlin.de>,
  "Marco Lange" <marco.lange@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Kwyxta <kwyxta@blaze.net.au> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
930210181.490291@diddley.primus.com.au...
> > I heard there is a programmatic way of not just estimating Pi, but
PROVING
> > it to any decimal precision. The problem is that the speed of the
algorithm
> > slows in a logarithmic fashion proportional to the precision... (eg.
doubly
> > long to calculate the next digit and so on)
>
> Then "exponentially" would be the right expression, it slows down
> exponentially. If this is true, the algorithm ist absolutely useless.

    The Buffon needle thing _is_ absolutely useless as a practical
method for calculating Pi. It's not supposed to be a practical
algorithm for finding Pi (plenty of algorithms for that exist),
it's just a mathematical curiosity: hmm, if you do this you get
Pi, isn't that interesting.

> Say, if you need 1/1000 second to calculate 10 digits of PI, you would
> need 1.024 seconds to calculate 20 digits and 1048.576 seconds to
calculate
> 30 digits.

    It's much worse than that (but again, it's not supposed to
be a practical method for doing the calculation). I once made a
little Buffon simulation gizmo - took a _long_ time to get
4 or 5 decimals right, if I recall correctly. (I _never_ got
much farther than that - even ignoring roundoff, you'd need a
very very good random number generator.)

> For only 50 digits you would need over one billion
seconds(!).
> I could do that myself much quicker.
>
> CU,
>   Marco
>
> --
> ****************************************************
> * E-mail:    marco.lange@gmx.de                    *
> * Homepage:  http://www.marcolange.de              *
> * ICQ:       35807782                              *
> ****************************************************
>
>


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.