Area Estimation

Simulations (or Verification of Technique)

Before we use the technique outlined above, we need to check if it gives us the right results. To do this, we simply use it on shapes with known area. For this activity, I used a circle, a square and a triangle, the formulas for the areas of which are widely known. The shapes I produced using my code in a previous activity are found below.

circle radius = 200 square side = 400 triangle base = 400 triangle height = 400

Using the edge function, I obtained the following. So far so good.

But when I calculated the areas….

While the areas for the circle and square are okay, the method (hopefully not my code) has a relatively large error of 28% for the triangle. It seems as if the ‘pointier’ the shape, the larger the error. (Still working out why this happened.) This may be a limitation of the technique used.