How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? - Edu News | NASA/JPL Edu
www.jpl.nasa.gov
While world record holders may have memorized more than 70,000 digits of pi, a JPL engineer explains why you really only need a tiny fraction of that for most calculations – even at NASA.
  • Elise@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    About 17 bytes of data. For reference a common size for numbers is 8 bytes. I imagine Nasa has hardware for efficiently handling larger numbers such as 16 bytes and possibly more.

    • admiralteal@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      I mean, so do you. Any common device can handle computation with numbers a lot larger than 8 bytes, using appropriate software. Hell, even Python can handle that pretty routinely.

      Very large numbers are used routinely in cryptography.