Tim May writes:
[ individual bits of pi ]
I didn't see this result you mention, but it surprises me. The part about how it works in some bases, but not in decimal.
It's an open question as to whether there's a version that works in base 10. There's a nice summary at "http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/plouffe/plouffe.html".
In summary, I would be surprised to find that a method for calculating the Nth digit of pi works for base N but not for base M (modulo some minor efficiency factors related to machine architecture, etc.).
It does seem strange, but radix conversion can be much more expensive than the baseline algorithm. I vaguely remember hearing that the billion-digit pi computations done with AGM techniques haven't dealt with base 10 recently. Cheers, Peter Monta pmonta@qualcomm.com Qualcomm, Inc./Globalstar