While world record holders may have memorized more than 70,000 digits of pi, a JPL engineer explains why you really only need a tiny fraction of that for most calculations – even at NASA.
About 17 bytes of data. For reference a common size for numbers is 8 bytes. I imagine Nasa has hardware for efficiently handling larger numbers such as 16 bytes and possibly more.
I mean, so do you. Any common device can handle computation with numbers a lot larger than 8 bytes, using appropriate software. Hell, even Python can handle that pretty routinely.
Very large numbers are used routinely in cryptography.
About 17 bytes of data. For reference a common size for numbers is 8 bytes. I imagine Nasa has hardware for efficiently handling larger numbers such as 16 bytes and possibly more.
I mean, so do you. Any common device can handle computation with numbers a lot larger than 8 bytes, using appropriate software. Hell, even Python can handle that pretty routinely.
Very large numbers are used routinely in cryptography.