Via BBC -
A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi - and a few digits either side of it. Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit - when expressed in binary - is 0.
Mr Sze used Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record. The computation took 23 days to complete on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers.
The heart of the calculation made use of an approach called MapReduce originally developed by Google that divides up big problems into smaller sub-problems, combining the answers to solve otherwise intractable mathematical challenges.
At Yahoo, a cluster of 1,000 computers implemented this algorithm to solve an equation that plucks out specific digits of pi.
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