NAGANO, Japan, Aug. 30 (AP) - (Kyodo)—A company
employee in Nagano Prefecture calculated the value of pi
to five trillion digits this month using a self-made personal
computer, beating the record set by a French engineer who
calculated it to about 2.7 trillion digits late last year.
To calculate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its
diameter, to an undetermined number of digits,Shigeru
Kondo, a 55- year-old resident of Iida, assembled a
computer with 32 terabytes of hard-drive capacity and used an
application made by Alexander
Yee, a 22-year-old student at a U.S. graduate school.
After Kondo repeated tests via e-mail, he began the computation
on May 4, and the work lasted 90 days and about seven hours until
it was completed on Aug. 3, including verifications, following
difficulties including a power outage. He plans to apply
for the Guinness Book of Records.
The mountainous task affected the daily lives of Kondo's family.
His wife, Yukiko, 53, said they had to pay 20,000 yen a month for
electricity. The work was also threatened when their 29-year-old
daughter used a dryer and threw a circuit breaker. Kondo
managed to rescue the operation using a 10-minute backup power
supply.
As the temperature of the computer room soared to near 40
degrees Celsius, Kondo avoided a hardware meltdown by removing
casings and exposing computer parts to cooling fans.
Kondo has been engaged in computing the value of pi since
calculating the value to 1,000 digits as a fourth-year technology
college student. While working as a systems engineer for a food
company, he repeatedly assembled computers using commercially
available circuit boards and memory.
"This is for sheer self-satisfaction," said Kondo, who spent 1.5
million yen on the computer used in the latest calculation.
But "I used only 60 percent of the computer's total
capabilities," he said. "I want to try to compute the value to 10
trillion digits, possibly next spring."