Post #1517470
2026-04-16 13:26 UTC
OK, so I couldn"t just cheat and I did compare the radius to the circumference.
Which I did by counting - by hand this time - the number of straight and diagonal jumps between the little cells of the grid along the edge of the circle.
For a radius of 100, the circumference (which is then equal to 200 * Pi) is about 332 + 228 * sqrt(2). The square root of 2 is almost exactly 1.4, which I did check by hand (14*14 = 196).
That means that 200 * Pi = 651.2 or so, which means Pi is, by definition, 3.256 (or slightly below that because square root of 2 is slightly more than 1.4), if the world is slightly pixelated.
There you go.
Replies (1)
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@oddtail@meow.social 2026-04-16 13:35
I think this exercise was fun and useful because 1) it's nice to sometimes do an experiment just to get a handle of how to design one, and 2) before computers, people did have to figure out a way to calculate pi with some precision, did they. And the more accurate they wanted to get, the more hours (or hundreds of hours, if they wanted more precision) that needed. So doing an extremely quick-and-dirty method (and still cheating with a spreadsheet) makes you appreciate the people who actually did do this, hundreds of years ago.