New Digits of Pi

A computer scientist at Yahoo has used “cloud computing” to find the most distant digits yet of pi’s decimal expansion.

This new approach to networking machines and processors, allowing them to act as one super-computer rather than, say, 100 individuals, allowed this record-setting calculation to be in 23 days when, under normal circumstances, it would have taken nearly 500 years.

Apparently a similar approach at Google resulted in verifying that every configuration of the Rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or less.