Meme of two women fighting while a man smokes from a pipe in the background.
The women fighting are labeled "mathematicians defining pi" and "engineers just using 3 because it's within tolerance"
The man smoking is labeled "astrophysicists" and the pipe is labeled "pi = 1"
Is it actually? I'll admit im pretty rusty on time complexity, but naively I'd think that pi being irrational would technically make even reading or writing it from memory an undecidable problem
If you're trying to calculate it, then it's quite difficult.
If you just want to use it in a computer program, most programming languages have it as a constant you can request. You get to pick whether you want single or double precision, but both are atomic (a single instruction) on modern computers.
Do said atomic instructions produce pi though, or some functional approximation of pi? I absolutely buy that approximate pi is O(1), but it still seems like a problem involving a true irrational number should be undecidable on any real turing machine
"Modern" is a bit misleading, x87 had
fldpi. The whole x87 part of the standard has been deprecated with x86_64 in favour of the whole sse series of instructions and those don't come with pi. You instead load a constant from program memory, just like any other.As processors (as of yet) still support those legacy modes they will also contain the constant somewhere in probably microcode storage, calculating it on the fly makes literally no sense at all: It's (for x87) 80 bits of data, much shorter than any imaginable program, smaller than any circuitry able to compute it so you'd be spending time to save no space which is pointless.
ARM, RISC-V etc. come from the RISC tradition so they wouldn't be caught dead including such an instruction. Both have zero registers though as zero is an absurdly useful constant, simplifying things drastically, both on the hardware front as well as within the instruction set (move is add zero to source, save to destination, clear is add zero and zero, save to destination)
Now, that's finite constants. In particular, it's about floating point arithmetic, which is a wonder of maths and a deep rat's nest of numerology, but has finite precision, it's not true real arithmetic. Real real arithmetic is undecidable, in particular comparison and expansion to decimal form are undecidable. Printing infinite strings of digits is usually not what we want to do, and limiting precision of comparisons is... not ideal, but better than having limited precision at every operation: You can decide once you're comparing how accurate you want things to be and don't have to worry while writing down your formula (btw Herbie exists, and that's why packages like this exist. In that case pi is not a constant but a formula, which can be expanded as needed. Quite slow compared to floating point hardware but when you need it you need it and even if you don't it's still useful as a sanity check, gives you an idea of how far off the floating point results are without having to call in a favour with a mathematician.