Buffon's Brownian needles : harnessing thermal motion for stochastic sampling

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Maslen, Charlie and Nicholson, Luke and Simmchen, Juliane (2025) Buffon's Brownian needles : harnessing thermal motion for stochastic sampling. Soft Matter, 21 (46). pp. 8897-8903. ISSN 1744-6848 (https://doi.org/10.1039/d5sm00844a)

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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.

ORCID iDs

Maslen, Charlie ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2995-0918, Nicholson, Luke and Simmchen, Juliane ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9073-9770;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)