This is a short Perl program that uses a Monte Carlo method to approximate Pi. The method is slow, and considering the number of bits in the generated numbers, Pi will never be very accurate, no matter how many runs you use. But it might be fun for someone.

Abigail

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Monte Carlo approximation of PI. Slow!

use strict;
use warnings;

my $in    =  0;
my $count = @ARGV ? shift : 1000;

rand () ** 2 + rand () ** 2 < 1 && $in ++ for 1 .. $count;

printf "Pi equals %f\n", 4 * $in / $count;

[download]

In reply to Monte Carlo approximation of PI by Abigail-II

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.