What is the history of calculating Pi with random objects?

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Dang! Our kitchen is too small to try it.
And I'm not going outside in this weather.
 
Is this an idea for a YouTube video? :biggrin:

The process of throwing toothpicks across a ruled sheet of paper sounded familiar... that was from a problem in Griffith's QM text.
 
What is the nutshell logic behind this study? Where in the experiment is PI manifesting itself?

My suspicion is that the object is not perfectly circular but mutliple thrwos makes it simulate an n-sided polygon - the more throws, the larger n is, the closer to PI it will be.

[ EDIT ] Duh. No. The length of the obect is equal to diameter, the number of times it crosses the line represents a random angle 0-360 degrees. [ /EDIT ]
 
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