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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

My roommate in college had, while in high school, gone for a Guinness World Record memorizing the number of digits in pi. He memorized them out to 800 or so, then discovered another had memorized it to thousands, so he gave up.

In college, he figured out how to write a program to compute an arbitrary number of the digits of Pi. I asked him how did he know it was correct? He said "just look at it. The digits are right!"

We were limited in the use of the campus PDP-10 by a CPU time allotment per semester. He was planning to blow his allotment computing pi, he figured he could compute it to 15,000 digits or so. At the end of the term, he fired it up to run overnight.

The PDP-10 crashed sometime in the early morning, and his allotment was used up and had no results! He just laughed and gave up the quest.

Later on, Caltech lifted the limits on PDP-10 usage. Which was a good thing, because Empire consumed a lot of CPU resources :-/

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The limits on memorizing digits of pi have been lifted to great heights by Akira Haraguchi [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi

Interesting: Despite Haraguchi's efforts and detailed documentation, the Guinness World Records have not yet accepted any of his records set.

Guiness is not an "authentic" record-keeping organization, in that they largely don't attempt to maintain accurate records of "the most X" and "the fastest Y". Rather, their business model is primarily based on marketing and publicity stunts: a company makes a ridiculously large pizza or whatever, and pays a very large amount of money to have Guinness "verify" their record for biggest pizza. A Guinness world record is just Guinness's record; it's commonly different from the true world record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records#Change_...

Guinness claims that the IBM System/360 (1964) was the first computer to use integrated circuits. I've tried unsuccessfully to convince them that they are wrong. The Texas Instruments Semiconductor Network Computer (1961) was the first, a prototype system, followed by multiple aerospace computers earlier than the System/360. Moreover, the System/360 used hybrid SLT modules which weren't even integrated circuits, so it's not even a contender. Maybe you could argue that the System/360 was the first commercial, production computer to use high-density modular electronics, but that's a lot of extra adjectives.

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/first-com...

Guinness started out as a joke. And if you look at the diversity of records it has, it definitely falls in the theme of a joke

Not to mention, being used as a whitewashing tool by autocrats across the Middle East and Central Asia (for no reason other than a dick measuring contest).

> Later on, Caltech lifted the limits on PDP-10 usage. Which was a good thing, because Empire consumed a lot of CPU resources :-/

Knowing Caltech, there's a 50:50 chance that PDP is still running somewhere, torturing some poor postdoc in the astrophysics department because no one wants to upgrade it or port some old numerical code to a modern architecture.

In the 2001 film "Swordfish", there was always a piece of dialogue that stood out to me where Hugh Jackman describes code for a computer worm he wrote in college as being hidden on a PDP-10 I.T.S. machine kept online for history's sake. It's shown and noted that his character went to Caltech.

It is saying something that this might be the most plausible part of the film.

I recall the computer used in "Demon Seed" was a PDP-10.

P.S. He was a heluva lot smarter than I am. He was always willing to coach me through the thermo and physics problems. I owe him.

Funny timing. I was just musing about a middle-school classmate who endeavored to calculate as far as she could by hand and thinking how dated the idea was an hour ago. This was in the 90s, so it’s not as though we didn’t have computers. They just hadn’t reached mass-adoption in households.

I went to RPI's summer program for high school students in the mid 80s. I was hand assembling and linking assembly for a PDP-11 in the computer lab for a class, and I struck up a conversation with the sys admin of the "big" VAX-11 machine. The load over the summer on the VAX was low, so he was using the whole VAX to calculate the digits of pi. When I asked him "Why?", he said he hated to waste all those cycles. I remember less about the technical details of what he was doing than I do about PDP-11 assembly language. And pi is 3.1415927..., right?

Now that I am reading Meagher on octrees, I kind of wish I had met him--I think he was there at the time. I did get a tour of the image lab, and remember the colorful monkey on a monitor.

Empire! What a classic. Burned many cpu cycles of my Atari ST computer on that.

Empire was responsible for many F's and at least one divorce.

It's still available for Windows on Steam.

Edit: And yes, over the years I've wasted many many hours on my Atari ST and Macs running Empires.

I memorized pi to 100 places in high school, but it didn’t get me any dates. The girls were more impressed by the jocks.

I should have attended a more geeky high school.

Being well rounded is important.

Who needs a significant other when they’ve got a hundred significant digits?

pi = 3

It was not rational, in hindsight.

The girls would have outsmarted you at the more geeky high school. And they would be more impressed by the rich prep boys.

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