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Published on: November 7, 2016
Buffon's Brownian needles: harnessing thermal motion for stochastic sampling
Charlie Maslen1, Luke Nicholson1, Juliane Simmchen1,2
1University of Strathclyde, 295 Cathedral Street, Glasgow G1 1XL, UK. juliane.simmchen@strath.ac.uk.
Abstract:
We demonstrate a physical implementation of Monte Carlo sampling using the Brownian motion of microscopic rods, applied to the classical Buffon's needle experiment. In this way, a problem in geometric probability is mapped onto a Monte Carlo method, with a physical system performing key aspects of the computation. The experiment's parameters are embedded directly: the rods length encodes the probability integral, while their thermal motion supplies the sampling. Although only a toy-model system, this approach illustrates how embedding probabilistic structure into soft matter can provide a low-energy pathway for stochastic computation that exploits freely available thermal noise.

