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From Buffon's Needle to Buffon's Noodle

17 points by _alternator_

by card_zero

1 subcomments

I'm wary of asking questions (my curiosity is bounded), but what changes if you limit the range of allowed angles to multiples of, say, 10°? How about 90°, does pi go away then?

by enricozb

1 subcomments

Pretty neat! However, if you wanted to know the _probability_ of a noodle crossing any line in the long noodle case (L/W > 1), the expression is more complex (and I believe would require an integral) :).
It's interesting that the number of crossings is independent of whether L/W is less than or greater than 1, but the probability of crossings is equal to 2pi * L/W only in the short case. This makes sense since in the short case the noodle can at most cross a single line.