this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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Yes, that's the idea, it's just that the "spoiler" likely only revealed something that was already known (that specific digit), or at any rate, something that could be computed on a much smaller computer and in less time. Mostly though, that's a bit of mathematically interesting info.
I don't feel like watching a video but maybe there will be a more informative article sometime. I wonder if they used some existing software like Y-cruncher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-cruncher
The calculation technically only takes 12 straight days to compute, but they had many interruptions over the process, sometimes having to fully restart the whole calculation.
They did use Y-cruncher.
Edit: Some other fun tidbits: most of that 2.2 petabytes of storage wasn't actually used to store the 300 trillion digits itself - that number of digits fits in like 170 terabytes (which LTT is thinking of making available as a download, lol) - it's actually used a pseudo-ram during the actual calculation.
Cool, yeah, the digits themselves are at most 0.5 byte each ;). I don't know enough about the higher level algorithm to say exactly how the rest of the storage is being used. There is a book called "Pi and the AGM" about pi computation and similar algorithms that is supposed to be really good, but it looks over my head mathematically.