> Ron Frank came in, looked at the copy on his desk, circled a > digit towards the end of the long number and wrote, "Are you sure about > this digit?" and put it back on the Desk Jeff was using.
This sounds very much like an anecdote in Richard Feynman's *Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman?* But then my memory is going too. On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Joey K Tuttle <[email protected]> wrote: > Upon looking a little more at the page - > > http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/ > > mentioned in the post below, I was amused to note that the last 138 of > the 4,194,304 places of pi displayed on that page are random and/or > wrong. Problems begin about decimal place 4194166 which is shown as 9 > but should be 7. I suppose such errors are not very high up on the list > of misrepresentations on web pages, but in my case it caused a smile and > memory of an event that took place some 40 years ago. > > Jeffery Shallit ( http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/ ) was a summer > intern at the IBM Philadelphia Scientific Center in 1972 (I think). He > was working on some high precision computations using APL. I can't > remember whether it was a precise evaluation of pi to several thousand > places, or perhaps Mersenne prime #24 ( _1 + 2^19937x ) - but in any > case, Jeffery had succeeded in printing out this lengthy number, and > left a copy of the pages of digits on several people's desks. The next > morning, Ron Frank came in, looked at the copy on his desk, circled a > digit towards the end of the long number and wrote, "Are you sure about > this digit?" and put it back on the Desk Jeff was using. > > That afternoon, Jeff came in and discovered the note and raced into > Ron's office saying, "How do you know that digit is wrong??" To which > Ron calmly replied, "I have no idea if it is correct or not - I was just > asking if you were sure...." > > I was (am still) impressed with Jeffery's work because he did it in an > 80Kbyte APL workspace. Hard to imagine these days when it is routine to > work with a hundred thousand times that much memory.... Although I note > that J only consumes 80704 bytes to calculate _1 + 2^19937x that's > impressive too. > > I've copied Jeffery on this note, and wish I had an address to pass my > memory past Ron. In my experience, it seems likely to me that either > they wouldn't have any memory of such an event, or might have versions > quite different from my memory. It is strange/interesting how our > memories work. > > On 2012/05/08 09:44 , Joey K Tuttle wrote: > > Being a fan of things pi, I'm wondering about several things in your > post. > > > > The URL you give points to a site purporting to have 4 (not 50) million > > digits of pi. Maybe I missed a pointer to a larger dataset. > > > > > > > > On 2012/05/08 03:56 , Joe Bohart wrote: > > > > I've load 50 million integer digits of pi and trying to do a moving > average > > on them. > > > > NB. data from http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/ > > NB. used perl to write each digits on 1 line of file data > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
