# [RC5] Quick positive press effort

Tim Charron tcharron at interlog.com
Tue Sep 22 21:34:10 EDT 1998

> >      Not that finding digits of \pi is intrinsically more insteresting
> >      than cracking encryption challenges, but the press doesn't seem to
> >      be so much prejudiced against the process.
> >             -- Eric Gindrup ! gindrup at Okway.okstate.edu
>
> From personal experience (and I don't feel this way, in fact I've been a
> hardcore digit hunter for years), when most people I know hear about
> the latest pi crunching record they think "What a bunch of geeks. If
> only they did something serious".
>
> Is this the image that d.net desires? Yes, I know; as Richard
> Feynmann(sp?) put it, "What do *you* care what other people think?"
> But then maybe we shouldn't.

This particular quest for digits of Pi has even more of a geek factor
than is initially evident.  The digits that this search seeks to
discover are part of the base 16 representation, not the base 10
representation.  This is due to a relatively new discovery for a
highly efficient formula for calculating base 16 digits of Pi.  There
is no similar approach for the base 10 representation.

-- Tim
Tim Charron
timc at distributed.net
tcharron at interlog.com
http://www.interlog.com/~tcharron/

An idle computer is a terrible thing!  http://www.distributed.net/

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