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2015/07/11

Interview-Style Coding Problem: Estimate Pi

Saw this as an example of the kind of programming test you get in interviews, so I decided to give it a try.

Just to report, it gets there at $i = 130657.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use feature qw{ say  } ;
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use utf8 ;

# Given that Pi can be estimated using the function 
#   4 * (1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …) 
# with more terms giving greater accuracy, 
# write a function that calculates Pi 
# to an accuracy of 5 decimal places.

my $pi = '3.14159' ;

my $c ;
for my $i ( 0..1_000_000 ) {
    my $j = 2 * $i + 1 ;
    if ( $i % 2 == 1 ) { $c -= 1 / $j  ; }
    else { $c += 1 / $j ; }
    my $p = 4 * $c ;
    my $p2 = sprintf '%.05f' , $p ;
    say join ' ' , $i , $pi , $p2 , $p  ;
    exit if $p2 eq $pi ;
    }

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