Calculating Pi on a C64

[Tpapp54321]

I just finished reading a book that talked a little about the Chudnovsky brothers and their race to discover digits of pi. It covered a little background history on the discovery of pi and the development of how computers allowed for the discovery of more digits and it got me thinking. How many digits of pi would a computer like the C64 be able to compute?

[thetick1]

Depends how long you keep the C64 plugged in ?

 

You can use arctan expansions on C64 basic. This is what was used back when BASIC was a common programing language.

 

See http://justbasic.conforums.com/index.cgi?board=code&action=display&num=1146782052. Author claims the BASIC program at the bottom was used on 1978 Apple with only one command change.

[SignGuy81]

If each digit were stored in one nibble(half a byte) as binary coded decimal then the answer would have to be less than 131,071 as there are 64KB which is 65,536 Bytes, which is 131,072 nibbles, of that 1 nibble would be used for the 3 before the decimal place. That leaves 131,071 which then there would have to be some of that used for decimal place, and then also there would already be RAM used to to start with anyway. I could be completely wrong on how the information would be stored in ram as well that was just me guessing I have no clue.

[SignGuy81]

Or also I guess it could keep calculating and printing the data while clearing out previous so could keep going like the person above me mentioned.

[SignGuy81]

This was a programming puzzle which wanted an irrational number such as pi calculated to as many decimal places as possible on a 64KB machine. Nobody chose pi though.

 

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/15405/produce-the-most-digits-of-an-irrational-number-with-only-64-kb-of-memory