Tasks / Pi
Calculate (Not look up) Pi with a friend
1 to 314 players
15 points
Level 1
Created by Kyle Hamilton
4 completed :: 5 in progress
Interested in collaborating on this: (no one yet!)
this task is retired
Comments
chumps = people who might be thinking about doing this using c/d, and not giving a fig what mathematicians' asses think about it.
I was taught that pi is the ammount of times the radius oes into the circumfrance.
Surley this wouldnt be too hard to calculate without mathy bits. Just some string and something circular and possibly a ruler.
. . . but there are other interesting possibilities that don't require big sums. After all, a monte carlo calculation is still a calculation.
And, a suitably absurd, entirely mechanical monte carlo calculation would be a lovely completion of this task.
Grrr... still haven't found a way to get the sf0 scripts to pass an apostrophe in a URL. (I've tried all the usual tricks.)Damn. Got to cut and paste, I guess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon's_needle
(Or, if you're absolutely devoted to circles, at least use a friend as the measuring instrument. None of this rulers and string stuff.)
but I like rulers and string! lol
Praxis
Buffon's Needle Problem is a classic statistics problem which appears unrelated to pi. A needle is dropped on a floor covered with parallel lines; it lands somewhere at random on said floor, and at some angle. What is the probability that it crosses ...
Secret Agent: The calculation I give you now was actually made in November, but only now have security measures been reduced, resulting in its declassification. Of course there's also the fact that LC-A, my collaborator, is slow as can be when it c...
Extensive studies were done to uncover the value of pi. Knowing theoretically that pi = Circumference / (2 * radius) our scientists have taken to the field to take measurements. Field Aestheto-Scientist Fizzbang's Reports: Where do we see circles...
Pi is awesome. e^(pi*i)=-1. This is pi calculated the old-fashioned way. Imagine a circle with radius r, and a square where the distance from the center to the middle of one of the sides is also r. The area of the square is then 4r^2, and the are...
Euclid was cool and all with his geometry and his circles, but I want to see some real calculating.
You know you want to! Don't be shy, show off your calculus skills!!! If you don't I will.
OR
Using the beautifully inefficient Leibniz formula "calculating π to 10 correct decimal places [...] requires over 10,000,000,000 mathematical operations"
is for chumps