Floats can only represent numbers up to sys.float_info.max, or 1.7976931348623157e+308. Once you have an int with more than 308 digits (or so), you are stuck. Your iteration fails when p1024 has 309 digits:
179769313486231590772930519078902473361797697894230657273430081157732675805500963132708477322407536021120113879871393357658789768814416622492847430639474124377767893424865485276302219601246094119453082952085005768838150682342462881473913110540827237163350510684586298239947245938479716304835356329624224137216L
You'll have to find a different algorithm for pi, one that doesn't require such large values.
Actually, you'll have to be careful with floats all around, since they are only approximations. If you modify your program to print the successive approximations of pi, it looks like this:
2.914213562373094923430016933707520365715026855468750000000000
3.140579250522168575088244324433617293834686279296875000000000
3.141592646213542838751209274050779640674591064453125000000000
3.141592653589794004176383168669417500495910644531250000000000
3.141592653589794004176383168669417500495910644531250000000000
3.141592653589794004176383168669417500495910644531250000000000
3.141592653589794004176383168669417500495910644531250000000000
In other words, after only 4 iterations, your approximation has stopped getting better. This is due to inaccuracies in the floats you are using, perhaps starting with 1/math.sqrt(2)
. Computing many digits of pi requires a very careful understanding of the numeric representation.