Simulating Buffon's needle on Matlab I am trying to simulate dropping Buffon's needle onto an A4 sheet of paper, but I am not sure how can I construct an A4 size area (21 x 29.7) and define 2 vertically line at 7cm and 14cm in Matlab. I also need to check if the needle(5cm) has crossed a line or crossed the edges of the paper, How can I achieve that ?

clc,clear

%Note that the condition 'an A4 paper' is in fact not used.

n=1e5;
l=7;
a=5;

s=0;

for i=1:1:n
x=l+l*rand; %If we use 'x=3*l*rand', we should study the cases where x=0 and x=3*l.
%y=29.7*rand; The value of y is in fact useless.
theta=pi*rand;
d1=abs(x-l);
d2=abs(x-2*l);
theta1=pi-acos(d1/a);
theta2=acos(d2/a);
if thetatheta2
s=s+0;
else
s=s+1;
end
end

p=2*a*n/l/s;
er=abs(p-pi);

fprintf('Pi=%f with n=%.e and er=%.e\
\
',p,n,er);


Just for fun :D