Elain Brown Tech 06.09.2022 06:Jun AM EDT

Does Pi Have 100 Trillion Digits? A Google Developer Claims to Have the Answer

Google developer Emma Haruka Iwao has once again solved Pi's 100 trillion digits.

Iwao, a developer advocate for Google Cloud, has established a new world record for calculating the most digits of pi. This accomplishment comes just three years after Iwao and her colleagues at Google established a global record for calculating π with the highest degree of accuracy.

Due to this recent discovery, Iwao has established a new world record for calculating the most digits of pi by making use of the cloud computing infrastructure. She has determined that the value of pi at the 100-trillionth decimal point is 0.

Why Compute the Pi?

When she was younger, part of Emma Haruka Iowa's childhood dream was to break the record for pi. And from then on, she took the challenge using Google Cloud.

Iwao is working as a developer on the Google Cloud. Part of her work is to produce demos and run experiments that highlight the technological capabilities that developers can do with the platform. Google Cloud has a program that allows anyone to calculate the digits of Pi.

According to Engadget, Iwao and her colleagues previously established a new standard for precision in computing in 2019, when they completed a calculation of 31.4 trillion digits, which was the previous record. Since that time, the benchmark has been surpassed multiple times; most recently, academics from a university in Switzerland calculated Pi to be 82.8 trillion digits, which is more than twice as much as the number of digits that the Google team achieved a few years ago.

Iwao and her colleagues are currently in the process of obtaining official confirmation from Guinness World Records that their accomplishment qualifies as a world record.

In the year 2019, it took computers 121 days to reach a digit count of 31.4 million. However, with this current accomplishment, they reached 100 trillion in 157 days, which was more than twice as quick as the first effort and a significant improvement.

How Did She Calculate the Pi?

Since the beginning of history, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from all over the world have been hard at work trying to calculate the value of pi. Nowadays, this calculation is now carried out by computers, which enables us to better understand how much more efficient they have gotten.

As explained by Iwao, she employed the same tools and strategies that she did in 2019, according to the blog post that she wrote. However, she was able to hit the new number more rapidly because of the advancements that Google Cloud's infrastructure made in computing, storage, and networking.

According to Google, one of the most astounding things that has happened in the field of computer science is that it has made incremental improvements each year, and as a result, her team has been able to achieve exponentially faster compute rates. Much of the modern computer-assisted research that has been conducted in fields such as astronomy and climate science has been made possible.

Regular computer researchers may not need to calculate trillions of decimals of pi, but this experiment showcased how Google Cloud's flexible infrastructure enables scientific experimentations to be solved by Google's platform.

The company stated that this computation was made feasible as a result of the developments that have been achieved over the past three years. Google added that "It's also an example of the reliability of our products - the program ran for more than five months without any node failures, and handled every bit in the 82 PB of disk I/O correctly."