Smirlouf
The same goes for this one... Lovely :-)
== Why did you do this ?
I am not especially interested in the digits of Pi, but in the various algorithms involved to do arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge. Arbitrary-precision arithmetic with huge numbers has little practical use, but some of the involved algorithms are interesting to do other things. In particular:
- The Discrete Fourier Transform. This transform is widely used in many algorithms and most modern electronic appliances (such as digital televisions, cell phones and music players) include at least one instance of it.
- The reliable managing of a very large amount of disk storage, at least for a single computer. Specific methods were developed to ensure high reliability and high disk I/O bandwidth. The same ideas can be applied to other fields such as video streaming or data base access.
- The whole computation is an extensive test for a computer including its CPU, RAM, disk storage and cooling system. A single bit error during the computation gives a bad result. A bad cooling results in a hardware failure.
It's the first Cocotron-based project I see featured on HN, although it's not the first success story that they could brag about...
See also: the account of the porting of the File Magnet Uploader, then Mac-only, to Windows, using the same library. http://macdaddyworld.com/2008/10/27/adventures-in-cocotron/
While I like the idea, I'm not sure it's a good idea to label it as such in the interface.
You might also have a hard time figuring out the genuine flaggings from the ones made by spambots...