"Long division, not wrong division" spoken like a true line manager

@skarrambo1

2 ай бұрын

So much so that I can hear Rhys Darby saying it

@pleasedontwatchthese9593

2 ай бұрын

"We are dividing but we are not deviated" -matt later on in the video

@darrenhundt

2 ай бұрын

@@skarrambo1 ...not swearwolves

@JPBelanger

2 ай бұрын

I was actually thinking it would be a good exercise for IT middle managers to do so they get to understand IT and its dependencies. The skill set is not that broad. They could do it.

@sohambasak6382

14 күн бұрын

Meanwhile Japanese folks be like "long division, rong division" same thing!

posted at 3:14pm GMT, well played Matt

@berend_dijk

2 ай бұрын

15 seconds after 3:14 pm I presume? 🤔

@swankgd

2 ай бұрын

If only he'd (or presumably his editor'd) managed to edit 5:07 off the run time.

@adroitbean5440

2 ай бұрын

And 926 milliseconds of course ​@berend_dijk

@incription

2 ай бұрын

I noticed that!

@jonathan-._.-

2 ай бұрын

but one day before 03.14 😣

23:24 The madlads built a branch predictor into their human GPU.

@kala_asi

2 ай бұрын

underrated comment!

@liliwheeler2204

2 ай бұрын

Absolutely underrated-I think this is one of my top 20 or so sentences ever said in the English language

@MIKAEL212345

2 ай бұрын

This is actually incredible. If they do this again, I wonder if they could get a cpu architecture engineer to help design the system.

@Ceelvain

2 ай бұрын

@@MIKAEL212345 unfortunately the huge error rate and the time scales involved are incomparable with semiconductors. My guess would be that we'd have to have an architecture very very different from a processor. But I like the overall idea of engineering a better process with those constraints in mind.

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

The insane thing is that it just, like, evolved naturally. This is divergent evolution.

"we cant cheer for every digit" proceeds to cheer for every subsequent digit

@gollossalkitty

2 ай бұрын

Until the last one

8:22 "Chunks of 20." 8:30 "60 - 100" Ah, the Parker Chunk.

@c4ashley

2 ай бұрын

😂👏

@ShaneTilton

2 ай бұрын

I was going to note that as well. However, they did correct it at 9:06

@bighammer3464

2 ай бұрын

Well seeing as the previous range was 60-80 it was still a range of 20

@k0pstl939

2 ай бұрын

Also wouldnt a chunk of 20 be 0-19, 20-39, etc.? (Or 1-20, 21-40, etc.)

@bighammer3464

2 ай бұрын

@@k0pstl939that’s true. I wonder what would be digit 0. If that’s 3 then that can be omitted and the range would be 1-20,21-40etc

"Ridiculous Maths Person" is the greatest complement I can recall ever hearing for an introduction.

@richardfarrer5616

2 ай бұрын

But what is the complement of a Ridiculous Maths Person?

@Jake9066

2 ай бұрын

@@richardfarrer5616 touché, foiled by misspellings again And I'm going to say solar physicist is the complement to ridiculous maths person

@WombatMan64

2 ай бұрын

That had me laughing so hard, I had to pause the video and recuperate.

@222dolson

2 ай бұрын

A physics professor and solar physicist of course

@LucenProject

2 ай бұрын

Quality delivery throughout. Is the narrator credited?

I noticed that at 3:14 , the names of the 7 arc tans are each 1 of 7 of their own group of 7; day of the week, samurai, continent, sin, ocean, pyramid(edit: wonder not pyramid), and dwarf!

@11macedonian

2 ай бұрын

I love that that occurred at pi minutes into the video too.

@Sgrunterundt

2 ай бұрын

Ancient wonder, not pyramid.

@purple_sky

2 ай бұрын

The great pyramid of Giza is one of the 7 wonders of the world!

@kindlin

2 ай бұрын

I thought the names were so random, obviously that wasn't the case. Thanks for filling me in on this!

@msx80

2 ай бұрын

That's so clever, lol! Thanks for pointing it out

Every year I look forwards to Matt getting pi wrong. Nice to see you guys actually nail it, well done.

@uNiels_Heart

2 ай бұрын

Actually, I wouldn't mind them getting it wrong. Matt would always turn it into a fun experience 😎

@DeathClawz

2 ай бұрын

Technically they'll always get it wrong every year. They could get 1000 digits and still be wrong :)

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

Nail it? They're only 0 percent of the way there!

@erlandodk

2 ай бұрын

He did get it wrong again. Just way less wrong than previous tries. 😀But it looks like everyone had fun doing it.

@uNiels_Heart

2 ай бұрын

@@erlandodk goes just to show that they weren't dividing hard enough 😆

0:48 "I don't think we are going to do this..." 0:52 "We're going to do this.." Give your editor a raise for that cut.

@irtur52

2 ай бұрын

I think Matt mastered the art of thinking in multiple timelines at once at this point.

@SgtSupaman

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, but then the editor needs a pay cut for the terrible audio levelling throughout the video, so it'll cancel out.

@ianmoore5502

2 ай бұрын

​@SgtSupaman they'll get it. If you know anything about it, you know it takes time and repetition to get good at. I'm grateful for their work regardless and can't wait to hear them improve

@kindlin

2 ай бұрын

There were some more of these too, like at the end of day 3: "I love watching this human machine going to smoothly" *jump cut to DAY 4* _All hell is breaking loose and new jobs are springing up by the hour._

@ShaneTilton

2 ай бұрын

@@kindlin I was going to mention that too

You know you're in the right show when the crowd goes crazy over a string of digits.

@ailaG

2 ай бұрын

Like sportsball fans? 😁

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

You'd think it was the lottery announcement.

@caioometto8198

2 ай бұрын

I literally got goosebumps with the crowd hahaha

@PeterJnicol

2 ай бұрын

​@@ailaGI love sportsball! (cue relevant xkcd).

@amigalemming

2 ай бұрын

It's a great thing to work with normal people for six days.

To me what is amazing is how closely you emulate a modern bureaucracy. You have created a controlled experiment in administrative science that most researchers could only dream of. It's even realistic in that some agencies have linear tasks that administratively resemble calculating pi. I wonder if you thought about creating incentive structures.

@alexpotts6520

2 ай бұрын

Being part of something unique and crazy and where everyone there has a shared passion is kind of its own incentive tbh.

@asgertrierkjr133

2 ай бұрын

@@alexpotts6520 true! In public administration it is called public service motivation. There seems to be a lot of that here--but they also manage to cultivate it among themselves (e.g. the presentation of the results).

@kindlin

2 ай бұрын

@@alexpotts6520 True, but imagine if there were _actual_ incentives, as well? Get 10c for each (total) digit, each day you're there. Calculate a lot of digits and be their most days and maybe get 100$ or something the time around. That is probably too much, but maybe it's X dollar gift cards, which could conceivably be sponsored by the gift card providers themselves (as gift cards are amazing marketing).

A hundred years ago, we would call these people computers.

@likebot.

2 ай бұрын

yup, it was a job description, even well into the 20th century

@s3cr3tpassword

2 ай бұрын

There were human computers all the way to the 1960s….

@TheAliencreeper13

2 ай бұрын

Technically speaking, they still are computers

@fredrickcampbell8198

2 ай бұрын

How did the early computers do calculations?

@AaronOfMpls

2 ай бұрын

@@fredrickcampbell8198 Pencil and paper, adding machines, log tables... 🙃

35:25 'I came here for pi, and all I got was sandwiches'

@red-.-red

2 ай бұрын

Legend

@username_not_found6926

2 ай бұрын

underrated quote

@julienroy3355

2 ай бұрын

To be fair, one of the participants baked and brought a pi but it wasn't big enough for everyone to get a slice. I didn't 😢

@joeyverliesharen

2 ай бұрын

Those students at the end were fantastic. I especially like the guy who rated the event a 3.1415 out of 5.

@8o86

2 ай бұрын

@@julienroy3355one of the participants was baked, and i suspect it was the dude with the sandwiches

Classic "off by 1" error Edit: referring to the video being uploaded the day before Pi Day

@ELYESSS

2 ай бұрын

they are missing the carry so probably not off by just one.

@Imthefake

2 ай бұрын

off by 1/10^140

@quehablo

2 ай бұрын

He posts a day early so teachers can use the video on pi day if they would like!

@risesir

2 ай бұрын

@@quehabloWell, you’re not wrong. 😂

@musickid43

2 ай бұрын

Classic Parker's calculation

For anyone curious, the 140th digit of Pi is "2".

@ronraisch2073

2 ай бұрын

Thank you for that comment

@johngamble5270

2 ай бұрын

Spoilers!

@christineng9527

2 ай бұрын

3.14159...282725352848111 is all I remember (the 7 is the 139th digit)

Something that should be noted about why we were so surprised by the last few digits, the 2 numbers, each 140 digits long that were subtracted to give us pi, were found by adding 7 different 140 digit long numbers each. when adding 7 numbers together you can get carry over that goes several digits over. So to know what a digit is, it isn't enough to calculate that many digits, you need to calculate several more digits to be able to get the carry over as well. the last 5 digits all could have been wrong without us making any mistakes what so ever. the 5th and 4th digit from the end were probably correct if we hadn't made a mistake. the 3rd digit from the end was somewhat lucky that it was correct. and the 2nd to last digit was actually 100% a coincidence. That's why we were so excited when it was correct.

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

Very helpful. I should have known this stuff, but I didn't quite understand my class on numerical analysis, or whatever it was called. All I remember was ULPs, heh. I was aware of IEEE double precision guard digits, which serve a similar purpose perhaps.

@kindlin

2 ай бұрын

@@michaelbauers8800 It all relates back to the very concept that it is even _possible_ to split up the digits in a calculation like this. Each individual digit only depends on so many of the factors in that long arctan expression, so you only need those nearby factors to get at each specific digit, and they just run the whole scheme in 20 digit increments to optimize for the human ability to work through long division while not getting bogged down in too many digits at once. At the end, you necessarily start losing those last factors that you just haven't calculated to ensure those specific digits, so at any point, if one of those uncalculated factors affects the digit you're investigating, each subsequent digit would likely also be wrong.

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

@@kindlin Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I was not thinking very clearly about the specifics earlier. There's worse case scenarios for PI, such as those glacially converging series. Like the Leibniz series

@rmsgrey

2 ай бұрын

A) When adding two numbers, you can get a thousand digit carry or more - write down a thousand nines and then add one to that number, and that one will carry through a thousand digits. B) What matters is the range of the potential error. Adding seven numbers with the same precision gives an error from zero to seven in the last digit, and subtracting off another seven numbers makes the error between negative seven and seven. For a calculated value ending 176, that means if your only errors come from truncating the fourteen numbers, the true value would have to be in the range 169 to 183, so the penultimate digit would have a decent chance of being correct (5/7 or ~71%) while the last digit is basically random. C) Of course, if there was additional uncertainty in the fourteen numbers beyond their having been truncated, that would automatically create corresponding uncertainty in the final result, but isn't explained above.

@martinshoosterman

2 ай бұрын

@@rmsgrey theoretically yes, practically no. an n digit carry is only possible with a series of 9s, which is exponentially unlikely (proportionate to 10^-n). It's also something we would have known about since one of the sums would have resulted in trailing 9s. If your result isn't trailing 9s, then you know that you can't have an arbitrarily large carry over error. So practically, no.

"...most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

@evanbasnaw

2 ай бұрын

Nice Douglass Adams reference there.

@EcceJack

2 ай бұрын

That came to my mind, as well!! :D

@gollossalkitty

2 ай бұрын

What

@victorwindahl4903

2 ай бұрын

​@@gollossalkittyfrom The Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy.

@richardfarrer5616

2 ай бұрын

But doesn't that mean pi = 42?

This is an excellent demonstration of how productivity doesn't scale linearly with manpower. The final digit countdown was incredible. What a lovely event

@asandax6

2 ай бұрын

The good old Vertical scaling vs Horizontal scaling conundrum.

@Vodboi

2 ай бұрын

Also the importance of multithreading

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

Software engineers like me, usually understand this. Overhead is a real problem. This was great!

@tsawy6

2 ай бұрын

Notably 7 days of 200 is only 1400 people-days, or about 4 people-years. Cuz long division is O(n^2), 139 digits is about 4/49s of the way to 700. Which seems almost reasonable based on the whole few decades thing Shanks had. Course the few decades thing is between publications, he published 530 digits, then went back a couple times over a few decades. I have no idea how long the first 530 took (and can't find anyone who does!)

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

This isn't a video about maths, it's a video about management.

It's nice for the pi day videos to release on March 13 so that teachers have it available to show their students on pi day!

@JEilonwyn

2 ай бұрын

Unless they live REALLY close to the international dateline😅

Matt reading off the result at the end might be my favorite "oner" ever. A single camera shot of a guy reading some numbers for five minutes was far more enjoyable and emotional than anyone could predict. Thanks to the podcast I've been looking forward to this for months, but it exceeded every expectation. I'm also terrified of what the next attempt in two years' time will look like. "Seventeen thousand people spent a month and three million Post-It notes to calculate pi!"

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

Wait, that was seriously five minutes? Feels like simultaneously six seconds and an entire movie.

@TheeGrumpy

2 күн бұрын

Now that you mention it... yeah. It's up there with "Once In a Lifetime" in Stop Making Sense.

I like how Matt's name badge has a pi symbol instead of the two T's

@SkillTimO

2 ай бұрын

I'm here for this.

@Giguv05

2 ай бұрын

Mapi :з

@yonatanbeer3475

2 ай бұрын

Map

@Darilon12

2 ай бұрын

Short for (Rediculous) Ma(ths) Pi(rson)

@zutaca2825

2 ай бұрын

Pronounced, of course, as Map Parker

22:45 "They're dividING, but they're not divided." Beautiful Matt, just beautiful haha.

@iswm

2 ай бұрын

diversity... er.. division is our strength!

@BurningShipFractal

2 ай бұрын

22:40

@oisyn-

2 ай бұрын

This really was Deus Ex: Mankind Dividing.

@BrianSpurrier

2 ай бұрын

United we Divide, Divided we Fall

Alternate title: "Matt builds a human GPU (again)"

@MrNikolidas

2 ай бұрын

*CPU

@pleasedontwatchthese9593

2 ай бұрын

@@MrNikolidas *APU

@HamStar_

2 ай бұрын

no GPU was right

@MrNikolidas

2 ай бұрын

@@HamStar_In that analogy, at a stretch Matt himself is the GPU. He built a CPU that gave him the data necessary to display it on the paper.

@HamStar_

2 ай бұрын

​@@MrNikolidasGPUs are excellent at massively parallel computation. The main thing they do is run small, similar, independent calculations in parallel, similar to what the human calculators are doing.

one of the volunteers here, such a great time, i didn't do much calculating but i was there as archiving went from a box to a desk, to a desk in the corner to desk in the corner with people with clipboards, i was on that desk for a time, crazy complicated as things changed around us all, somehow it came together in the end. I really enjoyed my time here and I'd also like to say, now that i have met the man, that Matt Parker is legend!

@TheDrewjustforyou

2 ай бұрын

Was there a bad bit filtered section? If you returned more than x incorrect digits you were assigned a different station?

@joelcooper6441

2 ай бұрын

@@TheDrewjustforyou no, the day was more informal than that, At the beginning, one of the council of pi would say 'we need people to do x', i (and a few others) volunteered for those things which were logistical in nature like archive team or copying or doing the mod check

I wouldn't be worried about Steve multiplying things by 2. I'd be worried that he would cut things in half and cover them with clear acrylic! 😂❤❤

@DukeBG

2 ай бұрын

Ah, years ago you would be worried he'd pour it out of a beaker.

@thedepthandbreadthofseth

2 ай бұрын

@@DukeBG why not both?!

@lasagnahog7695

2 ай бұрын

And incrementally shaving people's facial hair throughout the day

@lolilollolilol7773

2 ай бұрын

I wonder if there is a way to perform fast divisions with water or some clever machinery.

@christopherpepin6059

2 ай бұрын

​@lolilollolilol7773 There is and it is quite easy. Fill a bucket with the required amount of water, X. Pour it into a trough. Then insert dividers evenly spaced to create Y divisions. The amount of water in each bucket is X/Y

*The ghost of William Shanks* : Is everyone having fun and a good time? *Matt* : You know, I think everyone is! *Shanks* : Well, then they're not dividing hard enough! 🤣

@Brekekekiwi

2 ай бұрын

This is my favourite bit so far!

I feel like a curse has finally been lifted this year. Here's all of Matt's previous pi calculation attempts: 2013: 3.13834 2015 (part 1): 3.1512 2015 (part 2): 3.128 2016: 3.0418399789... 2017: 3.0523384783... 2018: 3.1415927 2019: 3.11791 2020: 3.1415916785... 2021: 3.875 2022: 3.14159265358868298... 2023: 3.11712 2024: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223176

@dominicpancella3012

Ай бұрын

He's approaching the answer, but it doesn't look like he's doing so mathematically (e.g., in the manner of a Taylor sequence)-the oscillations are pretty random.

Something about phrases like "this is the times table for Pacific squared" and "I just finished dividing by Doc squared" just absolutely tickles me

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

I actually misunderstood what was said, thanks for clarifying that.

@liz4v

2 ай бұрын

How did they pick these names? There's no theme!

@alexpotts6520

2 ай бұрын

​@@liz4v As noted elsewhere, the theme is "things that are part of a group of seven."

@liz4v

2 ай бұрын

@@alexpotts6520 thanks! Any idea what Doc refers to? And is Giza about the pyramids?

@alexpotts6520

2 ай бұрын

@@liz4v Doc is one of the seven dwarfs.

That’s outstanding! Last time you had a great open-loop process but no error detection and correction. Adding in the validation stages _dramatically_ improved your productivity. Now the challenge is to optimise the process without sacrificing reliability, and go for it again in 2025 🤗

@uNiels_Heart

2 ай бұрын

Right on! I'm confident they can figure out a clever way to be substantially better next time ✌

@liorean

2 ай бұрын

No, 2025 is for another ridiculous way of doing it. It's just the even numbered years they do it by hand.

@richardfarrer5616

2 ай бұрын

2026. It's ever two years.

@Alex-Lay

2 ай бұрын

If they had that archive group working well, maybe could they reuse the sheets for next time?

@syntaxlost9239

2 ай бұрын

I'd expect more resources to volunteer next time. They may hit some novel scaling problems unrelated to the calculation aspect from just having so many people concentrated for a week.

JAMES GRIME CAMEO!!!!!!

@TonyB369

2 ай бұрын

We love James Grime!

@bl4cksp1d3r

2 ай бұрын

Steve Mould with his 2Pi cameo!

@LSA30

2 ай бұрын

Ayliean was there too!😊

@Irondragon1945

2 ай бұрын

singing banana!

@pdblouin

2 ай бұрын

A veritable who's who of the people the KZread Maths Algorithm has shown me.

For Matt Parker, this is a genuine acheivement. 139 digits. Good luck getting further next time Matt!

@gollossalkitty

2 ай бұрын

Maybe we can try harder than six 😤

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

Like 10 times the previous best? He had a lot more help of course. The error checking was critical of course

@dominicpancella3012

Ай бұрын

I think this system is a pretty good baseline-also, as people have pointed out, if you scale the number of man-hours up to what Shanks did, you'd far surpass his record. Maybe two years from now he'll have found a Taylor series that distributes the workload even more, or simply scaled up the operation with the current error-checking scheme. Honestly, if I were to have the resources to spend a week in London, I'd love to come out in 2026 and help them break the record.

19:17 Mat saw Shanks' redemption.

@uNiels_Heart

2 ай бұрын

Is that a pun on Shawshank Redemption? 😆

@Yezpahr

2 ай бұрын

@@uNiels_Heart Took me a while of puzzling to make a good one, but yes it was.

@rednammoc

2 ай бұрын

To the punitentiary with you!

You know, I just realised that its poetoc that 139 is a prime number! I was bit bummed we didnt reach 140 but pi was hand calculated upto prime number of digits which makes it even better

@LibertyMonk

2 ай бұрын

I'm pretty sure the leading 3 isn't included in the number of digits, so arguably 140 total digits was reached, but only 139 after the decimal point.

@jamasa0074

2 ай бұрын

141 would also be nice because, y'know 3.141

@insanecreeper9000

2 ай бұрын

@@jamasa0074Twin prime with 137, 1/137 being one of the most important numbers in the universe.

@JohnDlugosz

2 ай бұрын

I think they properly calculated 138 digits (not counting the leading 3.) and got lucky on the next one, that didn't have a carry-in from the next bunch down that did not get computed.

@arnabbiswasalsodeep

2 ай бұрын

@@JohnDlugosz on my reply here, i have arranged the numbers (in group of 10 digits ) so knowing the last didgit was wrong even you can see that excluding the 3, its correct till 139th decimal

We can't let these darn number enthusiast get away with another one of these projects of pure silliness! We've been working so hard in education to create a system that gets that disgusting joy out of those kids as early as possible and now this guy comes and keeps ruining everything. Won't somebody please think of the children?

@petergerdes1094

2 ай бұрын

I've got nothing against this kind of silliness -- I'm totally here for it -- but it's a shame when educators think this is the way to make math interesting as if what us mathematicians do is sit around doing long calculations.

@mana3109

2 ай бұрын

@@petergerdes1094 If a kid saw this and saw all the people having fun, they may ask why they're doing it in the first place. That line of questioning could lead down a road of "what even is pi?", "why does that formula produce pi?", etc. And that's how a kid could maybe get sucked into the beauty of math

@petergerdes1094

2 ай бұрын

@@mana3109 They could...it could also convince them it's nothing but more stupid calculation which is the primary reason they hate math and don't get anything out of it. It mostly depends on their teacher, if they have a good teacher who actually understands what's going on and is incentivized to convey math as being something with interesting questions and creativity of course they can use something like this but they could also use a 1000 other more common things too. It's the teacher who understands why math is interesting and fun that's the commodity in short supply. Unfortunately, even though most teachers are well meaning they were usually only taught math as a matter of rote calculation as well and when that's true I agree this kind of thing is better than nothing but it doesn't replace actually conveying that math is so much more. Not to mention the incentivizes in the classroom encourage them not to do that.

@stnylan

2 ай бұрын

Hacker: "Education in this country is a disaster. We're supposed to be preparing children for a working life. Three quarters of the time they're bored stiff." Sir Humphrey: "Well I should have thought being bored stiff for three-quarters of the time was an excellent preparation for a working life" (Yes Prime Minister)

@justinwatson1510

2 ай бұрын

The problem is that our education system wasn't designed to actually educate children, it was created to take the children of working class people and turn them into compliant but effective cogs for our corporate overlords. If you want a better education system, we need to get rid of capitalism.

going from 1 person 6 digits to 5 people 5 digits really shows how "if you wanna go fast go alone. If you wanna go far, go together"

With the number of digits this team calculated this year... you could construct a circle, 1 million times the size of the known universe, 28 million billion light years in diameter, to the precision of 1 hydrogen atom. That deserves the applause.

@deltalima6703

2 ай бұрын

Suspicious.

@barakeel

2 ай бұрын

@@deltalima6703this is just 10^139.

@CartinaCow

Ай бұрын

@@deltalima6703 Mathematicians have estimated that an approximation of pi to 39 digits is sufficient for most cosmological calculations - accurate enough to calculate the circumference of the observable universe to within the diameter of a single hydrogen atom.

This is the first time in 40 years that a computer was comprised of a bunch of wired together logic in one giant building.

@jakistam1000

2 ай бұрын

Isn't a server room, or a supercomputer, a bunch of wired together logic in one giant building?

The next time you do this you're gonna blow the record out of the water. That optimization, checking in parallel with the next set of calculations starting is big.

@paulramsey2000

2 ай бұрын

No, that was a scheduling optimizing for completion of 140 digits with a given amount of resources not a throughput optimization. Had they not given out that speculative work as the parts wound down then people would have been idle waiting for the calculations to be confirmed.

@paulramsey2000

2 ай бұрын

Unless they get a bunch more people to participate next time. In that case they may need to do this to have enough work for all of those people.

@pietergeerkens6324

2 ай бұрын

I'm intrigued by the lack of mention of how "resource allocation" was done. It's a fact that dividing by those very large values is a very specialized task; especially when alternative tasks of dividing by the small odd numbers, performing the modularity checks, and adding are also required. I'd wager that it is **difficult** to accurately predict in advance who performs best at the most challenging long divisions. Introducing a task-orientation for resource allocation, based on observed error rates, I believe has huge potential for reducing error rate. That's the real bottleneck. Every incorrect return now ties up multiple more capable (for that class of calculation) resources AND delays subsequent work.

@paulramsey2000

2 ай бұрын

A detailed write up of the plan and execution would really interesting.

I absolutely loved being part of this Tau / 2 calculation!

Atleast it makes sense that the last digit was the one that was off, there was probably a carry over from the next digit you didnt have

@uNiels_Heart

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, and they expected more digits to be off (as you can probably grasp from their suspense in the video) as the carry-overs usually come in as multiple of digits (in this kind of calculation), not just one.

@xanderlastname3281

2 ай бұрын

@@uNiels_Heart well yeah, I'm aware. What I'm saying is the one digit that WAS off is (probably) not their fault Had they continued 2 more digits, the current final digit would probably be right, and the new final digit would be wrong (In theory) (Is what I was talking about)

@luisglahn3649

2 ай бұрын

Yeah exaclty. Since there are more then 50 numbers or so added up (We needed to go up to arctan order 40 or so for the Monday arctan, which means already 20 odd terms for this one arctan) there could have been a two digit carry over. Therefore we didn't expect the 139th digit to be correct as well

I never thought I'd get genuinely emotional watching this video lol but at the end I almost had tears in my eyes. Theres just something so beautiful about when humanity can collaborate on something just to prove to themselves they can do it. Why can't the whole world just be like the group of people in that auditorium? Happy Early Pi Day!

@loops8274

2 ай бұрын

I cried during the final readout. No shame. We love humans here

@Pouckie90

2 ай бұрын

This is the first time I got emotional because someone was just reading numbers ...

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

Great things can happen when people put their minds to it. Silly things can happen too! Hooray!

@VivekYadav-ds8oz

2 ай бұрын

@@Pouckie90I actually did get emotional once before someone was reading out numbers! Dad was not pleased with my marks.

@ahall9839

Ай бұрын

Because the world needs houses and highways, not a bunch of sweaty nerds with zero muscle mass and blue hair

really puts into perspective the sheer difference computers made. a single computer (and a low end one too) could do all of this in probably less than a second.

@0ia

2 ай бұрын

Yea actually low end computers are so fast; the new ones only feel slower because software developers are lazy and waste the extra speed. Lots of bloat in modern software, both in the operating systems and in the software we run!

@Kleyguerth

2 ай бұрын

@@0iaIt's not about laziness, it's about market timing... A slowish software that gets released beats the incredibly fast software that's still in development

@0ia

2 ай бұрын

​@@KleyguerthI suppose my idea of "laziness" is an optimistic idea that people would want to only release fast software, and you're probably right.

@LibertyMonk

2 ай бұрын

@@0ia bloat doesn't come from laziness, it comes from a lot of hard work adding features that you'll never know exist, or just devour because it makes for a better experience. We hit "fast enough", then optimize for things other than raw speed nobody can notice.

@mission2858

2 ай бұрын

@@0ia some stats: I have an intel I3 1115G4, which has 844 GFLOPS of GPU power a high end RTX has about 20x or more power the most powerful computers are millions of times faster than mine the most powerful computer can do 1 100 000 000 000 000 000 32 bit operations a second. there are 8 billion humans on earth if all of us pooled together solely to do mathematics, we would be comparable to the most powerful computer *40 years ago*

So you practically turned Pi into a big social happening that brings people together and makes everyone happy. Nice work, man! 🙂

Congratulations to matt parker for breaking 2018's record of 14 digits of pi correct( that pi day 2018 pi record held for 6 YEARS)

Please note down the new value of pi: 3.13

@SuviTuuliAllan

2 ай бұрын

*13.3

@willclark491

2 ай бұрын

This makes me suspect a legislature was involved!

@natheniel

2 ай бұрын

Parker Pi

@ireallyhatemakingupnamesfo1758

2 ай бұрын

@@nathenielthe less known cousin of the Parker square, the Parker circle!

@alexsere3061

2 ай бұрын

google is giving me a pi animation whenever I use the calculator, I was so confused if maybe pi day had changed or sth

0:49 that cut, 10/10 funny

23:17 to continue Emma's computer analogy, this is where they added speculative execution and increased the performance. Was great fun to participate in this event. Thanks for organising!

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

I thought it was a great analogy. I started remembering the work that went into my toy CPU ( built in a logic gate simulator.) Back in the old days, there were no pipelines in CPUs. Now they rely on pipelines. And of course super computers have relied on pipelines since the beginning for all I know; Cray 1 used "vector processing" which was pipelining. I once parallelized an algorithm and it was slower. So the comment made about it not linearizing was of course very relevant. At some point, throwing more resources at a problem might even hurt. With lessons learned here though, I am sure they could scale to more people. Funding might be an issue.

I've never been so excited by someone reading digits of pi 😮

I was apart of the calculation and it was some of the most fun I've had in years. So many really fun people to talk to. I definitely recommend joining the next ridiculous maths project Matt does next

I like how the 7 arctan equations each have a name which is a member of a group of 7. But there are a few that don't make as much sense to me, hopefully they can be explained: 1. Monday (obviously 7 days in a week) 2. Shimada (I'm not sure on this one, but it's a city in Japan) 3. Asia (one of 7 continents) 4. Greed (one of the 7 deadly sins) 5. Pacific (another puzzling one, there aren't 7 oceans as far as I'm aware) 6. Giza (a city in Egypt, known for its pyramids, but I don't see a connection to 7 here, either) 7 Doc (the odd-named dwarf of the 7 dwarfs from Snow White) If there are explanations for Shimada, Pacific, and Giza, I'd love to hear them. (Maybe it's in the video and I haven't seen it yet, I paused to think about the names)

@lewisdean889

2 ай бұрын

shimada is one of the “seven samurai”, pacific is one of the “seven seas”, and giza is one of the seven wonders of the world!

@Imperial_Squid

2 ай бұрын

The Pacific one is probably in reference to the "seven seas", which is a term dating back thousands of years. The actual list is the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans apparently. Honestly it's more a narrative thing than a terminology thing so i wouldn't stress too much about it

@elideaver

2 ай бұрын

5: sailing the 7 seas is the stock thing a pirate does 6: pyramids of Giza are one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world

@nevcairiel

2 ай бұрын

2. Kanbei Shimada is the leader of the Seven Samurai 5. The Seven Seas is certainly a concept, even if out of date. 6. Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the World

@NeatNit

2 ай бұрын

Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

"Awfully drawn 8" "Yep. It's alright on here" That was gold.

that guy giving rating of 3.14 gets me...

@DeathClawz

2 ай бұрын

I knew it was coming as soon as he said "0 to 5" and it still made me laugh, the cut off was great too because you can tell he went on and said more digits lol

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

Comedic timing was perfect. I actually didn't see it coming, somehow.

That one guy is right, comparing this scheme to modern computer architecture is neat! The final day of sending out dependent sheets before finishing checking is similar in concept to speculative execution (related to the meltdown bug, sending out future instructions before finishing exception checking); lookup tables are similar to caches; and having figured out the dependencies between different calculations achieves the same goal as register renaming. I genuinely don't think there's any big ideas that apply from computer architecture that got missed!

FINALLY, Matt you have posted a PI day video on PI day here in NZ ❤️ Much appreciated

19:28 this looks like a Monty Python skit

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

Almost certainly inspired by The Holy Grail. I would be surprised to find out it wasn't.

was so much fun to help out, Matt!! Thanks so much to you and all the team for organising this mathematical madness, can't wait to have another crack in a couple years time!! - Freddie :)

Please have *Pi Fisher* 36:09 back for the next attempt. I'm sure their efforts were invaluable

@malterichert2927

2 ай бұрын

We need to know more about this person: Are you actually named Pi? Are you a mathematician? Are your parents mathematicians? Do you have three kids born in march, january and april? Are your siblings named e and i?

@TheVillan1980

2 ай бұрын

​@@malterichert2927It’s their evil twin named Tau that you need to watch out for.

@BRORIGIN

2 ай бұрын

Unless Pi Fisher answers himself, I can say that he is a very nice person! I was on the π-brary team (I'm talking at 7:00) and he was the head π-brarian. His name indeed is Pi (I do believe it is greek) and he helped us fish for pi. You can see him with brown hair and beard wearing a face mask in the π-brary. We definitely could not have done it without his organizational skills 🫡

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

2 ай бұрын

@@BRORIGIN A wonderful case of nominative determinism.

@wardr1

2 ай бұрын

Agreed!

I was there and it was every bit as fun as it shows in the video. Thanks for the opportunity!

27:13 That person in the crowd with an emotional support Blahaj😂

I love how in the process of doing this, Matt has independently discovered one of the reasons why writing multithreaded computer programs is so difficult!

It's been far too long since I've seen James Grimes

@shashanksistla5400

2 ай бұрын

singingbanana ftw

"Honestly, just felt kind of nerdy." A good cap-off.

They've calculated pi to the maximum accuracy you could fit into a tweet back in the day

I was not expecting the emotional swings. Fantastic editing.

amazing!! There's no reason next year you couldn't pick up at 140 and continue! MISTER Shanks didn't do it all in one go! So you guys can do the next 139 next year!

200 people over 7 days still can't beat 1 person over 40 years. That one person was phenomenal!

@kjdude8765

2 ай бұрын

On a per digit rate the new group was twice as fast, 10 person-days per digit, vs the original 27 person-days.

@Irondragon1945

2 ай бұрын

to be fair 200 people *7 days = 1400 peopledays which is less than 5 years for a single person

@CorwynGC

2 ай бұрын

The problem is not linear in digits. O(n^2) at least.

@GoErikTheRed

2 ай бұрын

@@kjdude8765I assume that the original guy wasn’t spending 8? Hours per day on this. While we don’t really know how many man hours/digit he spent, this year’s efforts can provide a benchmark for future techniques

@asheep7797

2 ай бұрын

Well, I mean, 8 billion people over 100 years can't beat 1 person over 40 years without computers!

This team is chock full of big names: Sophie Maclean, Katie Steckles, James Grime, Matt Scroggs, Ayliean McDonald... These people are my celebrities.

I love the tongue in cheek news story presentation, the ominous juxtaposition cuts to each day, and the final countdown gave me shivers 🎉 With this system figured out, I think you might have the world record in the bag next year! I'm absolutely signing up to help however I can

One of the greatest meetings of Nerds ever seen. Very close to a Star Trek convention. Love it.

@deltalima6703

2 ай бұрын

Trek. 😰

Such an awesome experience, I was there for nearly the whole thing. Surrounded by so many nice people just having fun, no stress, just good vibes and meeting the youtubers I'd watched for so many years and making new friends. Thank you so much for organising this Matt, Katie, Sophie and the entire standup maths team!

WOW! I genuinely did not expect this video to bing a tear to my eye, but I was taken at the end past the 100th digit. Just brilliant! The last digit being off was the icing on the cake because, to me, it showed the optimal amount of error correction was in place. Well done to everyone involved.

@ps.2

2 ай бұрын

The last digit was not a mistake. It could only have been right by pure luck, because it's the result of adding 7 terms together, and there was likely a carry/borrow from the 141st and 142nd digits, which they didn't have time to calculate.

I love the explanation of 16:40 because the parallel between those people and a processor was also my first thought!

It was so fun to be a part of this process, was there for 2 days and thoroughly enjoyed both! Great to meet lots of different Maths nerds along the way. I shall certianly be joining the next attempt whereever amd whenever that may be!!! Cheers Matt for signing my calculator!

I love how this calculation is XKCD 1417 compliant.

I am so happy and emotional at the same time. I always feel this way when I see human endeavor. One of the best pieces of KZread. Thanks Matt. Thanks team.

Not sure why but I have grown to look forward to Pi day because of how you come up with methods new to me. It is so interesting! You’ve captured my attention ever since the domino computer. Conceptually beautiful to me even if there were hiccups with that video and I’ve been with you for the Pi ever since

I can’t believe I cried at the accomplishment. Hard work and good attitude as well as a little bit of luck made it so incredible.

What a lovely editing job you people did! It was a joy to watch in full :)

It was incredible to have been a part of this, thanks to all the team for organising it. See you all in 2026 for the next attempt when we'll get even further! 💜

Of the very many funny moments in this video, calling Steve Mould an "Independant observer" was the one that made me laugh the most. Astonishing work nonetheless - congratulations all around!

What an awesome way to pass your time -- gathering as a group of math nerds -- brought a tear to my eye with people cheering the last digits. I think with some logistics you'll reach 500!!

3:20 I had a hearty chuckle at those team names. 7 references to groups of 7. Well played.

One of the most exciting videos on KZread. I may have shed a tear. Bravo!

when I was a kid and I heard about people or computers figuring out what the digits of pi were via calculations, I always assumed that just meant measuring a circle's diameter and circumference and then doing a single long division problem of c/d. I didn't really understand back then that you wouldn't be able to accurately measure the circle to enough significant digits to get even close to a hundred digits of pi.

Classic divide and "concur" algorithm! I would love to participate in one of these impossible events some year, geography permitting!

3:12 xkcd 1417

@RubyPiec

2 ай бұрын

oh my god it is

@siener

2 ай бұрын

Well spotted. I missed it. Here's what each collection of seven: 1. Days of the week 2. Seven Samurai (I had to Google this one) 3. Continents 4. Seven deadly sins 5. Seven seas 6. Seven wonders of the ancient world 7. Seven dwarves Edit: The Pacific one is a bit suspect. The expression "the seven seas" is ambiguous, and the Pacific is not on all lists and on some is divided into the North and South Pacific.

@MattMcIrvin

2 ай бұрын

@@siener It's actually remarkable how culturally widespread the notion of "the seven seas" is despite a *total* lack of consensus as to what those seas are: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Seas

16:21 - i agree with Emma. Ironically, the most interesting part of the video for me was the logistics of coordinating everything and how each dedicated-function desk all fed-together to make a full system for calculating pi.

I think the really interesting thing is how the layout of the room and the tasks each table was assigned, if very reminiscent of the diagram outlining processing cores in a CPU.

Before watching I was like: "Yeah maybe they'll get 12 digits this time"

@michaelbauers8800

2 ай бұрын

lol. Matt's past results were no where near as close. But he had a lot of help this time, and a lot of error checking.

That's an awesome effort, that was really worth watching. Memorable, I applaud too the great accuracy achieved in only one week, the seemingly great convivence and atmosphere, the video detailing the steps how it everything worked, the drama on that calculation almost mistake. The 140th digit I expected it would work, but I wasn't disappointed it didn't, it seems you were happy with the result, as I was, 139 is way more than enough digits to celebrate this as a momentous event for me! I salute everyone who worked tirelessly for a week for this project to come to this awesome and unprecedented fruition! :)

@uNiels_Heart

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, they were even afraid that the second to last as well as the third to last digits would be wrong, which is not unlikely considering they could easily get carry-overs from downstream calculations (which they weren't able to do in time) for those digits, I suppose.

watching the video a bit late, but the "it was not going well" in the first couple seconds elicited a verbal "oh no!" followed by a grin. I already know this is going to be another wonderful video

Very happy we got a Parker Quotient where the final value had one digit wrong. Congratulations Matt!

That ending was fantastic, I never knew I could get so emotional over pi (I'm more of a pastry person myself)!

I had an absolute blast participating. Thanks to Matt and the whole team, more than anything this is a triumph in organizing people. Everyone seemed to be having a great time doing math, and we got 139 digits of pi, sounds like an win all around

Thank you for organising this, this was so much fun to be apart of!!! Can't wait till the next one

I got weirdly happy when James Grime came on screen. I’m never ready for crossovers between my favorite channels. With computers, calculating pi is trivial, so I’m really enjoying the discussion of the logistical challenges and the strategizing to overcome them. Edit: Yay, and a wild Steve Mould! 🎉

@ps.2

2 ай бұрын

James Grime is pretty great, but I'm really here for the *Katie Steckles collab.* I feel like that's been awhile. They did some great ones back in the day. (Fun to see Ayliean Macdonald and Sophie Maclean as well, but they've been in my KZreads more recently.)

If I understand the algorithm correctly the team should be able to use these results as a starting point for further calculations. If they can average 150 digits per year they will break the record in three more years.

@JohnSmith-zq9mo

2 ай бұрын

Only if they kept intermediate results, and even then I doubt it.

@purple_sky

2 ай бұрын

I don't think we will, the challenge is really to start from scratch - and anyway, as @@JohnSmith-zq9mo says, there's a lot of intermediate results to carry over

@luisglahn3649

2 ай бұрын

Yeah I think everything was archived so that we could continue next time. However the effort grows with the number of digits squared. 300 digits would than take 4 years in total, and 600 digits 16 years in total. But there are ways to improve the process since the limit were the chain of dependencies and not the calculating power

So happy to have been a part of this!!!! Such a fun experience :D

That's an amazing achievement! Congratulations, Matt and Everybody who worked so hard or waited for that moment! I was genuinely so happy!

Excellent video Matt. I have been watching your videos since far before I should have been on the internet. Videos like yours on the transit of Venus, optimal calendaring, and parabaloid buildings sparked my interest in math at a young age. I still hold that to this day and it has motivated my decision for college major and guides me through the endless homework I have. This video, in the 10+ years I have been seeing your videos and consuming your books, may be the best you’ve put out. It feels so great seeing this stem from such a starting point not meant to be taken too seriously. Also the transcendental joke was funny.