Calculate Pi to a Huge Number of Digits


Calculate pi to digits.  (Be careful going over 100,000 as it may take awhile.)

      









When I set out to calculate pi with JavaScript, I could not find a faster algorithm than the one at
A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of Javascript.  The script above is similar, but stripped down for speed. 
  It requires an up-to-date browser that uses the Big Integer object (just about any except Internet Explorer).



The algorithm is actually the Maclaurin series for the arcsin of pi/6:




 
  

  
 


(where  |z| ≤ 1,  0!! = 1,  (−1)!! = 1 )





See

Approximations of π:  Arcsine and
Inverse trigonometric functions:  Infinite series at Wikipedia, and

Maclaurin expansion of arcsin x and
Finding the power series of arcsin x at Mathematics Stack Exchange for details about the algorithm.






Even though the algorithm yields only about three digits per five iterations, the numbers are small and the operations are simple, so it runs fast. 
Of note, it converges much faster on pi/6 than on pi/2. 
Many more algorithms are available; the next-fastest seems to be Newton’s formula; Plouffe’s is also fast.



The current world record holder for computing the most digits of pi (50 trillion on January 29, 2020) is the
Chudnovsky algorithm; it yields 14 digits per iteration, and runs fairly fast until the numbers start to increase; but the real problem in JavaScript is the calculation of the final constant which includes a square root.  Using
decimal.js and 100,000 significant figures, that one calculation takes over a minute on my machine.  Formulas like Bellard’s formula look like they would work, but bigger numbers and more operations mean that the algorithm slows down faster with more iterations than simpler ones do.



You can check the results at princeton.edu (pi-10million.txt, 10MB).  The final 100 of various numbers of digits:



1,000:
5982534904287554687311595628638823537875937519577818577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989

10,000:
2645600162374288021092764579310657922955249887275846101264836999892256959688159205600101655256375678

100,000:
8575016363411314627530499019135646823804329970695770150789337728658035712790913767420805655493624646

300,000:
0649079063277209044524503248575792807082252032623968335485158606931459783852836169456336186314956895

1,000,000:
0315614033321272849194418437150696552087542450598956787961303311646283996346460422090106105779458151



Not all browsers are created equal.  Firefox (81.0) will not create a Big Integer with more than 315,633 digits; the script above pads the numbers with 10 extra digits to ensure accuracy, so the practial limit is 315,623.  Chromium (86.0) will run more than 1,000,000 digits, but the speed drops off significantly.  Some benchmarks, Intel® Core™ i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz × 4:



   digits  Chromium  Firefox  (seconds)
  100,000        35       52
  300,000       371      498
1,000,000      4075       –











Here is a Bash script, bcpi, that uses bc to run the algorithm above. 
  It is not as fast as a browser, 995 seconds for 100,000 digits.  But it is much faster, and more accurate,
  than using the arctan function
  (bc -l <<< "scale=10000;4*a(1)",
  9 seconds vs. 99 for 10,000 digits). 
  It was written on Ubuntu MATE 20.04.



russell@focal-desktop:~$ bcpi
Calculate pi to how many decimal places?  1000
..
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\
81640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058\
22317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644\
28810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610\
45432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925\
40917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572\
70365759591953092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885\
75272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719\
07021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271\
45263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585\
37105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130\
99605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469\
08302642522308253344685035261931188171010003137838752886587533208381\
42061717766914730359825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778\
18577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989
.109 seconds
russell@focal-desktop:~$ 









Please visit russellcottrell.com |
  blog