How Are Unlimited Precision Integers Accomplished?

[Michael Hudson]

Paul Rubin <phr-n2002a at nightsong.com> writes:

> There's a beautiful paper by Borwein, Bailey, and Plouffe showing
> how to compute the (say) 1 billionth hex digit of pi, without having
> to compute all the digits leading up to it.  I don't know if
> anyone's figured out a way to do that in decimal though.

I think there are algorithms for finding the nth decimal digit without
having to compute the first (n-1) digits, but they're not as neat or
as quick as the formula for hex.  I'd post a reference if I could find
one...

Cheers,
M.

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