Professor Yasumasa Kanada and nine other researchers at the Information Technology Center at Tokyo University calculated the value for pi with a Hitachi supercomputer over 400 hours in September, project team member Makoto Kudo said.

The new calculation is more than six times the number of places in the record currently recognized by Guinness World Records - 206.158 billion places - which Kanada also helped calculate in 1999.

``We would need to verify it, but it sounds like Professor Kanada has broken his own record,'' Guinness World Records spokesman Neil Hayes said. He said a Guinness math expert would need to verify the data.

Kanada's team spent five years designing the program used in the September experiment, Kudo said.

The Hitachi supercomputer is capable of 2 trillion calculations per second, or twice as fast as the one used for the current Guinness record calculation.

Pi, usually given as 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and has an infinite number of decimal places.

Such an extremely precise calculation of the figure isn't necessary for any practical scientific use, but researchers say it contributes to improving scientific calculation methods.

12/06/02 10:42 EST