Exercise: Compute Pi

Spark can be used for compute-intensive tasks. This code estimates π by "throwing darts" at a circle. We pick random points in the unit square ((0, 0) to (1,1)) and see how many fall in the unit circle. The fraction should be π / 4, so we use this to get our estimate.

• Write a function to generate random coordinates and return True if the point is within the circle x^2 + y^2 < 1.

• Generate n samples, and use a filter to count the number of points within the circle.

• Pi is 4.0 * count / n

Exercise: Compute Pi Jupyter notebook

Solution for Pi Jupyter notebooks