help me calculate pie to 500,000,000 places?
ROFL. 500 million digits! Do you mind if I ask why the hell you would want to attempt that? I challenge you to read that number out loud when you find it.
Even when calculating variable densities in white dwarf stars or their orbits around contact binaries I’ve never needed to use anything more exact than
well actually i need 625,000,000. i was given the challenge to find the 5 billianth binary digit of pie, sorta like that kid did in 1999
Hah! I’d just guess between 0 and 9… it’s a 1 in 10 chance 
Well there you go!
Have fun dude, and make sure to let me know what it is, just incase I get asked sometime.
i bet its 7, or 0.
I’ll bet it’s a 1 or 0. Flip a coin.
The algorith is kinda like this:
pi = 4(1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7… (-1)^n/(2n + 1))
Or even more accurately:
pi = 4(12*arctan(1/18) + 8arctan(1/15) - 5arctan(1/239))
Thats to 1 million decimal places.
Or to take spelling into account: at $2.25 a slice 500,000,000 ‘places’ would cost $1.125 billion dollars.
plus gst unless you buy them in groups of six or more…
Sounds like a good use for SIMD instructions if you have to write software to do it. I got a 6 fold speedup by putting some SSE into one of my programs.
I wrote a java program that does it. Slow though, drains alot of memory, and only does it to double (15 significant digits).