Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.
I am not especially interested in the digits of Pi, but in the various algorithms involved to do arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge.
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic with huge numbers has little practical use, but some of the involved algorithms are interesting to do other things. In particular:
- The Discrete Fourier Transform. This transform is widely used in many algorithms and most modern electronic appliances (such as digital televisions, cell phones and music players) include at least one instance of it.
- The reliable managing of a very large amount of disk storage, at least for a single computer. Specific methods were developed to ensure high reliability and high disk I/O bandwidth. The same ideas can be applied to other fields such as video streaming or data base access.
- The whole computation is an extensive test for a computer including its CPU, RAM, disk storage and cooling system. A single bit error during the computation gives a bad result. A bad cooling results in a hardware failure.
He's also behind QEMU (cross-platform, multi-architecture CPU emulator/dynamic recompiler/virtualizer), TCC (the Tiny C Compiler) and various other projects.
There's definitely some real world trolling at hand here (although I don't know whether it comes from Haagen-Dazs, from the journalist, or from both of them).
The same goes for this one... Lovely :-)