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by FavouriteColour 2710 days ago
“There exist algorithms like BBP to directly compute arbitrary binary digits without the memory cost of computing all the digits before it. These are called "digit-extraction" algorithms. However, these algorithms require roughly O(N*log(N)) time to compute a small number of digits at offset N. Using this approach to compute all the digits from 1 to N will result in a quadratic run-time algorithm. This alone makes it unsuitable for large N.”