Free Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston

solution to a problem it usually is trivial.”
    For that final, record-breaking, Hitachi-beating, transbillion-digit push into pi, Gregory did the calculation from his bed in New York, working on the Internet with the Cray supercomputer in Minneapolis, occasionally answering the phone when the system operator called to ask why the Cray had crashed. Gregory also did some of the pi work on a massive IBM dreadnought mainframe at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he also triggered some dramatic crashes. The calculation of more than a billion digits of pi took half a year. This was because the Chudnovsky brothers could get time on the supercomputers only in bits and pieces, usually during holidays and in the dead of night.
    Meanwhile, supercomputer system operators had become leery of Gregory. They worried that he might really toast a $30 million supercomputer. The work of calculating pi was also very expensive for the Chudnovskys. They had to rent time on the Cray. This cost the Chudnovskys $750 an hour. At that rate, a single night of driving the Cray into pi could easily cost the Chudnovskys close to ten thousand dollars. The money came from the National Science Foundation. Eventually the brothers concluded that it would be cheaper to build their own supercomputer in Gregory’s apartment. They could crash their machine all they wanted in privacy at home, while they opened doors in the house of numbers.
    When I first met them, the brothers had got an idea that they would compute pi to two billion digits with their new machine. They would try to almost double their old world record and leave the Japanese team and their sleek Hitachi burning in a gulch, as it were. They thought that testing their new supercomputer with a massive amount of pi would put a terrible strain on their machine. If the machine survived, it would prove its worth and power. Provided the machine didn’t strangle on digits, they planned to search the huge resulting string of pi for signs of hidden order. In the end, if what the Chudnovsky brothers ended up seeing in pi was a message from God, the brothers weren’t sure what God was trying to say.

     

    G REGORY SAID , “Our knowledge of pi was barely in the millions of digits—”
    “We need many billions of digits,” David said. “Even a billion digits is a drop in the bucket. Would you like a Coca-Cola?” He went into the kitchen, and there was a horrible crash. “Never mind, I broke a glass,” he called. “Look, it’s not a problem.” He came out of the kitchen carrying a glass of Coca-Cola on a tray, with a paper napkin under the glass, and as he handed it to me he urged me to hold it tightly, because a Coca-Cola spilled into—He didn’t want to think about it; it would set back the project by months. He said, “Galileo had to build his telescope—”
    “Because he couldn’t afford the Dutch model,” Gregory said.
    “And we have to build our machine, because we have—”
    “No money,” Gregory said. “When people let us use their supercomputer, it’s always done as a kindness.” He grinned and pinched his finger and thumb together. “They say, ‘You can use it as long as nobody complains. ’”
    I asked the brothers when they planned to build their supercomputer.
    They burst out laughing. “You are sitting inside it!” David roared.
    “Tell us how a supercomputer should look,” Gregory said.
    I started to describe a Cray to the brothers.
    David turned to his brother and said, “The interviewer answers our questions. It’s Pirandello! The interviewer becomes a person in the story.” David turned to me and said, “The problem is, you should change your thinking. If I were to put inside this Cray a chopped-meat machine, you wouldn’t know it was a meat chopper.”
    “Unless you saw chopped meat coming out of it. Then you’d suspect it wasn’t a Cray,” Gregory said, and the brothers cackled.
    “In a few years, a Cray will