"Everyone makes mistakesand sometimes those mistakes can lead to surprising discoveries. In the early 1990s, while programming the computer game Doom, game developer John Carmack set the value of pi () by handand in true nerd fashion, he wrote the number down to the ninth decimal place from memory: 3.141592657. Do you notice anything strange about that figure? The last digit is wrong. The number should instead be 3.141592654."
"Because Doom is an open-source computer game, you can download the codeand modify it. Gotszling did just that, testing what would happen if he changed the programmed values of pi. The results can make a viewer feel a bit nauseous. When Gotszling set = 3, for example, the pixelated world of Doom became distorted, with walls and pillars moving in unexpected ways. Nevertheless, the game was playable."
John Carmack manually entered pi as 3.141592657 while programming Doom, with the ninth decimal digit incorrect compared to the rounded correct value 3.141592654. The small numerical error had minimal effect on Doom because of 1990s hardware limitations and coarse pixelated graphics. Doom places the player on a moon of Mars in a first-person shooter format with demons and zombies. U.S. engineer Luke Gotszling modified Doom's open-source code to experiment with altered pi values and demonstrated the effects at a 2022 hackers conference. Setting pi to 3 caused pronounced geometric distortion, motion artifacts, and mild nausea, yet the game remained playable.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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