Code Golf: Leibniz formula for Pi

Answer 1

C#:

public static double Pi()
{
    double pi = 0;
    double sign = 1;
    for (int i = 1; i < 500002; i += 2)
    {
        pi += sign / i;
        sign = -sign;
    }
    return 4 * pi;
}

Answer 2

Ruby:

irb(main):031:0> 4*(1..10000).inject {|s,x| s+(-1)**(x+1)*1.0/(2*x-1)}
=> 3.14149265359003

Answer 3

Perl :

$i+=($_&1?4:-4)/($_*2-1)for 1..1e6;print$i

for a total of 42 chars.

Answer 4

64 chars in AWK:

~# awk 'BEGIN {p=1;for(i=3;i<10^6;i+=4){p=p-1/i+1/(i+2)}print p*4}'
3.14159

Answer 5

Mathematica, 27 chars (arguably as low as 26, or as high as 33)

NSum[8/i/(i+2),{i,1,9^9,4}]

If you remove the initial "N" then it returns the answer as a (huge) fraction.

If it's cheating that Mathematica doesn't need a print statement to output its result then prepend "Print@" for a total of 33 chars.

NB:

If it's cheating to hardcode the number of terms, then I don't think any answer has yet gotten this right. Checking when the current term is below some threshold is no better than hardcoding the number of terms. Just because the current term is only changing the 6th or 7th digit doesn't mean that the sum of enough subsequent terms won't change the 5th digit.

Answer 6

Here's a recursive answer using C#. It will only work using the x64 JIT in Release mode because that's the only JIT that applies tail-call optimisation, and as the series converges so slowly it will result in a StackOverflowException without it.

It would be nice to have the IteratePi function as an anonymous lambda, but as it's self-recursive we'd have to start doing all manner of horrible things with Y-combinators so I've left it as a separate function.

public static double CalculatePi()
{
    return IteratePi(0.0, 1.0, true);
}

private static double IteratePi(double result, double denom, bool add)
{
    var term = 4.0 / denom;
    if (term < 0.00001) return result;    
    var next = add ? result + term : result - term;
    return IteratePi(next, denom + 2.0, !add);
}