Today I Learned

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TIL NASA calculated that you only need 40 digits of Pi to calculate the circumference of the observable universe, to the accuracy of 1 hydrogen atom (www.jpl.nasa.gov)

submitted 11 months ago by ripcord@kbin.social to c/TodayILearned@kbin.social

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[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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.