According to Google Maps, the area of the state of Texas is 268,820 square miles. Texas almost fits into a square! The North to South distance is 765 miles and the East to west distance is 775 miles.The area of the rectangle formed by these two distances is 592,875 square miles. The image of Texas is drawn to the same scale as the rectangle. SET THE NUMBER OF POINTS TO BE RANDOMLY SELECTED IN THE RECTANGLE IN THE THROWS SLIDER, CLICK ON THE GREEN FLAG, AND COMPARE THE MONTE CARLO APPROXIMATION TO THE 268,820 SQUARE MILES AREA OF TEXAS.
I have put the Monte Carlo method into a custom block that runs without Screen refresh. That way, you can do 10 million points. Which is much slower than the systematic method of looking at every single pixel in the rectangle in turn. But both methods yield an area of around 284,500 square miles - more than 5% larger than the given area...
