A Dice of Pi
Description as a Tweet:
We have developed the LEAST efficient pi calculating algorithm known to man! Hope you have patience and a sense of humor...
Inspiration:
There are LOTS of engineers out there trying to change the world, so there's an enormous market for engineers who are trying to do nothing at all. That's why we've decided to create a virtual Rube Goldberg machine to calculate something humans have understood for millennia: pi.
What it does:
When using our application, you'll have a blast rolling dice in a colorful box, taking pictures of the box, uploading it to Python, and running exciting algorithms, all to get a number kinda close to pi!
How we built it:
We created a flashy container to roll dice in. We used the skimage library in Python to interpret a photo of the dice and extract the number showing. Next, this number is compared to another random number to determine if the integers are coprime (meaning they have no common factors). The probability of two integers being coprime is equal to 6/pi^2, so we can approximate pi using these random numbers. We then created a fun GUI to demonstrate this approximation to the user.
Technologies we used:
- Python
Challenges we ran into:
We were all working areas we were completely unfamiliar with before Friday. These include image processing, GUI design, and even Python as a whole.
Accomplishments we're proud of:
We are especially proud of the amount of learning we accomplished this weekend. To go from having very little experience in these areas to having a working application is something very challenging.
What we've learned:
The areas of GUI design and image processing were new to us. Now, we feel proficient enough to try something harder!
What's next:
Just to let it run for a while, and see if we can get pi to more than 3 digits.
Built with:
The software is written entirely in Python. The dice box is made of cardboard.
Prizes we're going for:
- Funniest Hack
Team Members
Jacob Rocha
Grady Sullivan