TI-59 vs HP-41 reviving the old contest

[Vassilis Prevelakis]

Back in 1982, there were a number of attempts to pit the TI-59 against the HP-41. In the PCC Journal V9 N5 (Aug 1982), p 25 there was an article called "LOTS OF PIE" which included a program for calculating the digits of pi on the TI-59.

Another contest involved calendar printing and (I think) another the calculation of digits of e.

Both e and pi calculations were limited by available registers, because all digits of the number were retained. However, since both the TI-59 and (of course) the HP-41 have output devices, how about a new contest to calculate e or pi by printing the digits calculated on the printer as they are computed.

Any takers?

**vp

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

Hi Vassilis,

do you have alogrithms for PI and e handy?

The TI line of programmables (56 and 59) were the first programmable devices I've ever owned. I might be interested in such a challenge.

Marcus

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

Hi Marcus,

Take a look at this algorithm (Brent-Salamin):

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/58283.html

I tested it on both the 48GX and 49G and it worked great. Of course I used the long float libraries available for these calculators to make the job easier (only a few lines using those libraries). It would have been more interesting the implementation of the required long float operators in RPL though. (Besides '+', '-', '*' and '/' it would be required long float square root).

Regards,

Gerson.

[John Limpert]

See http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/~plouffe/Simon/articlepi.html for an algorithm that allows you to compute individual decimal digits of pi.

[hugh steers]

i tried to port that algorithm to the 41, but its too slow. theoretically, you can continue to calculate pi forever, but in practice it quickly get to a 3-day wait for digits still below 1000.

feel free to improve my program!

http://www.voidware.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&page=http://www.voidware.com/calcs/hp41cv.htm

[Vassilis Prevelakis]

Oh, yes, Simon Plouffe is one of the team!

If you look at this picture (presumably from his desk:
http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/%7Eplouffe/prix.jpg),
you will notice in the right bottom corner an HP calculator (32SII ???).

**vp

[Chris Roccati]

The calculator in the image is an HP-32SII:
the keys in the leftmost column are (unreadable), (unreadable/likely STO), ENTER, XEQ, gold left arrow and a bit of the blue right arrow.