HAnd straight to the heart: how many of the more than 50 trillion decimal places of the circle number pi known to date can you recite off the top of your head? A quick survey of acquaintances revealed that most of them still get 3.1415926 together. NASA uses eight digits more for the orbit calculations of its space probes: 3.141592653589793.
But there are people who can memorize Pi with more than 70,000 decimal places. At https://www.pi-world-ranking-list.com/ you will find an official ranking of all Pi memory artists, led by the Indian Suresh Kumar Sharma, who broke the world record with 70,030 memorized digits in 2015. The top eight places in the world rankings go to Asia: five times India, twice Japan, once China.
The best European is the Swede Jonas von Essen (24,063 decimal places), the best German Frank Mertens (15,320 decimal places). It is not known which techniques the masterminds use to memorize such long sequences of digits. A trick could be to sing the sequence of digits as a melody. That’s exactly what our bonus track is this week: At https://pi.ytmnd.com/ you will find a pretty pop song whose polyphonic “lyrics” – you guessed it – are made up of decimal places of the number pi. Unlike the number pi, however, the song is finite – maybe it’s better that way…
Now our riddle: Which adventure computer game delivered on an audio cassette was inspired by the number pi? A little tip: There was a golden timepiece to be won – and a pop song could be heard on the back of the cassette. Please send your solution proposal to [email protected].
The closing date for entries is October 26, 2022, 9 p.m. We are giving away an eBook voucher worth 25 euros. The solution to last week’s puzzle was “Sinclair ZX81” (“Sinclair Spectrum” would also have been correct), the winner was notified in writing.