Reproducibility in Computational Science: A Case Study: Randomness of the Digits of Pi

Abstract

Mathematical research is undergoing a transformation from a mostly theoretical enterprise to one that involves a significant amount of experimentation. Indeed, computational and experimental mathematics is now a full-fledged discipline with mathematics, and the larger field of computational science is now taking its place as an experimental discipline on a par with traditional experimental fields. In this new realm, reproducibility comes to the forefront as an essential part of the computational research enterprise, and establishing procedures to ensure and facilitate reproducibility is now a central focus of researchers in the field. In this study, we describe our attempts to reproduce the results of a recently published article by Reinhard Ganz, who concluded that the decimal expansion of pi is not statistically random, based on an analysis of several trillion decimal digits provided by Yee and Kondo. While we are able to reproduce the specific findings of Ganz, additional statistical analysis leads us to reject his overall conclusion.