In my article on Buffon's needle experiment, I showed a graph that converges fairly nicely and regularly to the value π, which is the value that the simulation is trying to estimate. This graph is, indeed, a typical graph, as you can verify by running the simulation yourself. However, notice
In the R programming language, you can use a negative index in order to exclude an element from a list or a row from a matrix. For example, the syntax x[-1] means "all elements of x except for the first." In general, if v is a vector of indices to
Buffon's needle experiment for estimating π is a classical example of using an experiment (or a simulation) to estimate a probability. This example is presented in many books on statistical simulation and is famous enough that Brian Ripley in his book Stochastic Simulation states that the problem is "well known
Hello, 2012! It's a New Year and I'm flushed with ideas for new blog articles. (You can also read about The DO Loop's most popular posts of 2011.) The fundamental purpose of my blog is to present tips and techniques for writing efficient statistical programs in SAS. I pledge to
