Use CodeLlama as a Coding Assistant to Develop Numerical Simulations

Contributor Name: Federico Castanedo

Difficulty level: Intermediate

This Shortcut is inspired by a recent conversion I had with Odin Soler about teaching C and loop functions to computer science students.

The number Pi is a fascinating mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159, and is a common constant in many geometry and trigonometry formulae. Mathematicians and computer scientists have used supercomputers to extend the decimal numbers to many trillions of digits.

In this Shortcut, I use CodeLlama as a coding assistant to develop a numerical simulation, focusing on a Monte Carlo approximation method to estimate Pi. The idea is to place random dots on a square having a fraction of a circle inside—the ratio of dots inside the circle to the total number of dots is approximately equal to Π/4:

Figure 0.

Let’s see if we can do this with the help of CodeLlama-34b-Instruct from Perplexity Labs in the C programming language:

Prompt: You are an experienced C programmer. Your task is to write a program to estimate the number pi using a monte carlo simulation method by placing random dots on a square and a fraction of a circle inside. Only write the code and the comments without explanations.

CodeLlama-34B-Instruct:

 #include <time.h> #define ...