drop-needle 0.2

Simulate probability of a needle crossing a line on a table after it fell on it

Simulation experiment with needles

Blogpost

Please consider to also read my blogpost on Medium.

Authors and Licensing

• Author: Martin Draws

• License MIT License

Motivation

The problem discussed here might seem random. But the aim of this package is to show that an apparently complex challenge can be broken down into mathematical expressions to answer a certain question.

Task

Imagine the following situation. You have a table with parallel lines on it. The distance between these lines is constant across the table.

And you have a needle. It can be any kind of needle, but if it makes things easier for you, just imagine the needle is a sewing needle. The needle has a certain length.

We would like to answer the following question: given the distance between the parallel lines on the table and the needle's length, what is the likelihood that the needle crosses a line on the table after it fell on it?

Installation

To install the package from PyPi yout have to execute the following.

python -m pip install drop-needle 

Functionality

After installation the package can be loaded.

from drop_needle.Table import Table

# Initialize a table with a distance of 10 between the lines
table = Table(10)

# Simulate 10,000 needles with a length of 7 falling on the table
table.simulate(10000, 7)
0.4401