A retired couple in the US have revealed how they've won more than US$26 million after working out how to "beat" the lottery.
Jerry and Marge Selbee used to own a convenience store in Michigan but they soon turned their attention to the lottery when they realised how they could beat it. Their scheme began in 2003 when Jerry, who graduated with a degree in mathematics, worked out how to win different lotteries around the US. The lottery which Jerry took part in featured a "roll down" effect, meaning if no one won the US$5m jackpot, the money would be spread across those who matched three, four or five numbers. Working out the maths, Jerry purchased thousands of tickets knowing he would get a certain number of numbers on his ticket and would at worst break even. A Google employee from Japan has set a new world record for the number of digits of pi calculated. Emma Haruka Iwao, who works as a cloud developer advocate at Google, calculated pi to 31,415,926,535,897 digits, smashing the previous record of 22,459,157,718,361 digits set back in 2016. Although Iwao was using the same y-cruncher program to calculate pi as the previous record holder, her advantage lay in the use of Google’s cloud-based compute engine. The 31 trillion digits of pi took 25 virtual machines 121 days to calculate. In contrast, the previous record holder, Peter Trueb, used just a single fast computer, albeit one equipped with two dozen 6TB hard drives to handle the huge dataset that was produced. His calculation only took 105 days to complete. Outside of bragging rights, the 9 trillion extra digits are unlikely to have too many real-world uses. NASA only uses around 15 digits of pi to send rockets into space, and measuring the visible Universe’s circumference to the precision of a single atom would take just 40 digits. |
P. WadgeI am your teacher. Obey me. Archives
June 2021
Categories
All
|