can’t we calculate the magnitude of pi very accurately with this technique ?
Create A Huge File
You can create a file of any size using nothing more than what’s supplied with Windows. Start by converting the desired file size into hexadecimal notation. You can use the Windows Calculator in Scientific mode do to this. Suppose you want a file of 1 million bytes. Enter 1000000 in the calculator and click on the Hex option to convert it (1 million in hex is F4240.) Pad the result with zeroes at the left until the file size reaches eight digits—000F4240.
Now open a command prompt window. In Windows 95, 98, or Me, you can do this by entering COMMAND in the Start menu’s Run dialog; in Windows NT 4.0, 2000, or XP enter CMD instead. Enter the command DEBUG BIGFILE.DAT and ignore the File not found message. Type RCX and press Enter. Debug will display a colon prompt. Enter the last four digits of the hexadecimal number you calculated (4240, in our example). Type RBX and press Enter, then enter the first four digits of the hexadecimal size (000F, in our example). Enter W for Write and Q for Quit. You’ve just created a 1-million-byte file using Debug. Of course you can create a file of any desired size using the same technique.
The text you posted is simply using debug to change the size of a file to any number you want. And its actually a file with nothing in it. just the size recognized by windows is changed.
Pi is an irrational number, which means it can NOT be expressed as a fraction.
It can be expressed by infinite series, which means you can compute it arbitrarily precise, but you can’t just write down its value without an infinite amount of paper (unless, say, you define a base Pi notation, then Pi is 1 :p)
I still don’t get what the instructions in your first post have to do with it though…
I am not sure how one would go about calculating pi. However, I am almost certain it would be faster to write a program that would do only that, not try to build a file that is Pi times 10 to the whatever power bits long.
I don’t get the method above either but there are a lot of ways to compute a finite number of digits of the decimal expansion of Pi. “Accurate” is always a question of what you need your approximation for. Even with about 20 digits behind the comma you should get reasonable results for whatever you do.
Calculating billions of digits is more a philosophical / mathematical adventure than a necessary exercise (well, it might work as benchmark or something…). But to state something about the number Pi, you have to take into account ALL of its digits (the very number Pi, not a finite approximation…), something that you will never achieve with pure computation. Therefore it might help your intuition to look at billions of digits but it won’t help in a proof…
But I’d still like to know what the first post is actually meant to be >XD
