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Gangnam Style stats jam YouTube

By | Published on Thursday 4 December 2014

Psy

Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ video has done a ‘Kim Kardashian’s shiny bin bag’, and broken the internet. Or more accurately, it was watched so many times (way over two billion) that the thingamy on YouTube that was counting its ‘views’ got all flummoxed, and stopped counting. And that, everyone, is what they call ‘advanced mathematics’.

Nah, really it’s a simple case of integers. And bits. As YouTube explains, having fixed the broken whatsit, in a Google+ post: “We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met Psy. ‘Gangnam Style’ has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!”

!

Apparently if you “hover over the counter” on the video, you’ll see “a little math magic”. So go give Google the satisfaction now, by doing that at this link. Or, don’t.



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