Pi Recited to 100,000 Digits

DiAmOnDirc writes "Akira Haraguchi, 60, needed more than 16 hours to recite the number to 100,000 decimal places, breaking his personal best of 83,431 digits set in 1995, his office said Wednesday. He made the attempt at a public hall in Kisarazu, just east of Tokyo. Haraguchi, a psychiatric counselor and business consultant in nearby Mobara city, took a break of about 5 minutes every one to two hours, going to the rest room and eating rice balls during the attempt, said Naoki Fujii, spokesman of Haraguchi's office. Fujii said all of Haraguchi's activities during the attempt, including his bathroom breaks, were videotaped for evidence that will later be sent for verification by the Guinness Book of Records."

At 60!

[neatfoote]

It'll probably come out sounding patronizing, but I've got to say, I'm glad it was a 60-year-old who managed this. Our culture today is far too youth-centric-- hurray for older people proving they're capable of competing with and even outperforming the whippersnappers at feats of freakish, useless intellectual wankery.

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[Poltras]

Please explain to me how reciting a number to 100,000 digits is smart. Sure lot of memory, and I don't say he's not smart, probably does a good job as a consultant, but this act by itself is by no mean a proof of his intelligence. Now, he must be the only man who can remember (or not) the birthdays of his parents and girlfriends (if he has any)...

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[iron-kurton]

Hey, that's not fair. I'm posting on Slashdot, and married... to a real girl!

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[Psychofreak]

Seconded. Happily hitched for 3 years and counting!

Maybe we should do poll on the marital status/relationship status of Slashdot?

Phil

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[ClickOnThis]

Please explain to me how reciting a number to 100,000 digits is smart. Sure lot of memory, and I don't say he's not smart, probably does a good job as a consultant, but this act by itself is by no mean a proof of his intelligence.

Consider that "intelligence" can be (mis)measured in many different ways. The classic measure is an IQ test, which arguably does measure one's depths of reasoning in various ways, but at the end of the day, an IQ test really just measures how good one is at doing IQ tests. There are other kinds of "intelligence". For example, Wayne Gretzky might score modestly on an IQ test, but on a hockey rink, he was a "genius" in terms of psychomotor skills.

As other respondents have said, Haraguchi probably looks for patterns in the digits that he can associate with other memorable concepts, perhaps visual or aural, or both. I would argue that such an ability is indeed a form of intelligence, insofar as it does involve a higher form of mental activity -- a kind of "abstraction" of the perceived patterns of the digits into aggregates that are available for him to recall. I think it's similar to the kind of intelligence that a musician needs to memorize a piece of music.

Forget it's pi....

[Starker_Kull]

...I can't imagine memorizing 100,000 ANYTHING. Most people know about 25,000 words, 1,000 or so people, etc. - there is a certain amazement at what the human mind is capable of. Can you imagine if he memorized 100,000 faces and names? 100,000 cities and populations? It is astonishing how much information we can learn...

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[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, since Pi is infinitely long and never repeats, any finite series of digits must appear at some point.

Sorry that's a non sequitur. There are series which are (a) infinitely long and (b) non-repetitive but which nevertheless do not contain any possible (finite) sequence of digits, just consider the series 1 0 11 0 111 0 1111 0 11111 - look no repetition Ma but the subsequence '1337' (for example) does not appear anywhere.

How

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you type it from memory?

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[psymastr]

He's 60 fuck's sake. Why should he have a girlfriend? Nerd jokes are so American and so unfunny.

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[sacrilicious]

Technically, since Pi is infinitely long and never repeats, any finite series of digits must appear at some point.

Don't think that's true. Counter example: consider the stream of digits comprised of pi with all 7's removed. Still infinitely long and never repeating, but 7 never appears now.

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[suggsjc]

So what you are saying is that intelligence is all around us, just sometimes we have to either look harder to find it or just redefine intelligence all together?

Another example, some might have thought Earl was stumbling mindlessly drunk at the party last night, but had they looked closer they would have noticed that his intricatly placed footsteps were actually a plot of the first 18,000 coordinates of the Tau Dirichlet Series.

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[Morphine007]

That sounds almost as exciting as stabbing myself in the face with my pen.... repeatedly....