A study on the randomness of the digits of pi

摘要

We apply a newly-developed computational method, Geometric Random Inner Products (GRIP), to quantify the randomness of number sequences obtained from the decimal digits of pi. Several members from the GRIP family of tests are used, and the results from pi are compared to those calculated from other random number generators. These include a recent hardware generator based on an actual physical process, turbulent electroconvection. We find that the decimal digits of pi are in fact good candidates for random number generators and can be used for practical scientific and engineering computations.