Estimate pi

We can use map or reduce to estimate pi if we have code like this:

import pyspark 
import random 
if not 'sc' in globals(): 
    sc = pyspark.SparkContext() 
 
NUM_SAMPLES = 10000 
random.seed(113) 
 
def sample(p): 
    x, y = random.random(), random.random() 
    return 1 if x*x + y*y < 1 else 0 
 
count = sc.parallelize(range(0, NUM_SAMPLES)) \ 
    .map(sample) \ 
    .reduce(lambda a, b: a + b) 
     
print("Pi is roughly %f" % (4.0 * count / NUM_SAMPLES)) 

This code has the same preamble. We are using the Python random package. There is a constant for the number of samples to attempt.

We are building an RDD called count. We call the parallelize function to split this process between the nodes available. The code just maps the result of the sample function call. Finally, we reduce the generated map set by adding all the samples.

The sample function gets two random numbers and returns a one or a zero depending on where the two numbers end up in size. We are looking for random...