It looks like a Rubik’s cube had a baby. Minecraft is made of blocks. Hard, unyielding, cubic blocks. This is terrible geometry. Especially when you try to calculate pi (π). Pi is the soul of the circle. It has no edges. No corners. It flows infinitely, never repeating. Blocks don’t do that. Blocks snap.
So how did we get 3.14… from a world of voxels?
Molly Lynch from Hollins University and Michael Weselkouch from Roanoke College figured it out. They didn’t cheat. They didn’t install a mod to do the math. They built a system inside the game to approximate the constant as closely as the pixelated rules would allow.
If you don’t know the game—why don’t you? —here’s the gist. You walk around a boxy universe. You punch trees. You smelt dirt into bricks. It’s a sandbox. A very deep sandbox. Players have already proved it’s Turing complete. That means Minecraft can, in theory, run any computer program. People have built working calculators inside it. They’ve even coded a smaller Minecraft inside Minecraft. Recursive madness.
If a game can run code, it can run pi algorithms. Right?
Sure. But that’s boring. And it’s hard.
Coding in Minecraft requires translating electrical signals—logic gates, register clears, binary shifts—into redstone contraptions. A simple “if/then” becomes thousands of blocks of wiring. Lynch and Weselkouch wanted to avoid the headache. They wanted to show kids that math isn’t just textbooks. They wanted fun. They published a paper in 2024 with methods to calculate constants like pi using actual gameplay mechanics.
Throw some slimes
They picked the “darts method.”
Picture a square dartboard with a circle in the middle. You’re blind. You’re terrible at throwing darts. You chuck them at the wall. Most miss the circle entirely. But if you throw enough darts, the ratio of hits inside the circle versus total hits tells you the area ratio. Since we know the area formulas, that ratio reveals pi.
The square is four units wide. Area is 4.
The circle inside it has a radius of 1. Area is π.
The odds of hitting the circle? π / 4.
Hit enough darts. Divide hits by misses. Multiply by 4. You get pi.
Lynch and Weselkouch built a digital version of this.
They built a circle out of red wool. Radius 11. It’s lumpy, jagged, definitely not smooth. They surrounded it with a blue wool square.
Now they needed “darts.”
They used Slimes. Green blobs that bounce around aimlessly. Unlike other mobs that sleep when no player is near, Slimes keep wandering. They change direction randomly. They are chaos engines. Perfect for a Monte Carlo simulation.
They also needed killers. They brought in Zoglins. Angry zombie pig-men hybrids that rip Slimes apart on sight.
Here is the setup. Hoppers are placed on the red circle and the blue square. Hoppers pick up items. When a Slime dies, it drops items. The hoppers count them.
The slimes die. The items fall. The hoppers eat them. Data accumulates without you watching.
They divided the items collected inside the red circle by the items collected across the entire square. That gives you the probability of being in the circle. Multiply by 4 for the big reveal.
The result is… okay?
They ran the test.
619 Slimes died in total.
508 died inside the red “circle.”
The math looked like this:
π ≈ 4 * (508 / 639) = 3.05
Wait, the text says 619 total.
508 / 616 is close. Let’s check their math.
The article claims the result was 3.283.
Actually, 4 * (508/619) is roughly 3.282.
Is it accurate? No.
Real pi is 3.1415.
They were off by about 5%.
The authors admit this. They knew it wouldn’t be precise. But here is the trick.
Make the board bigger. Send in more Slimes. The law of large numbers is cruel but fair. With millions of Slimes dying on a massive map, the average creeps closer to the true value. The jagged edge of the 11-block circle matters less as the scale increases. The “blockiness” fades into the statistical noise.
Why do this?
Efficiency is dead here. You could calculate the first billion digits of pi in a second on a pocket calculator. Doing it in Minecraft is slower, messier, and inherently imperfect.
But watching a thousand Slimes get ripped apart by Zoglins while a counter ticks upward? That sticks with you.
Kids remember the game. They might forget the textbook. They remember that the red blocks meant “success” and the hoppers meant “proof.” Math became a battlefield instead of a chore.
Maybe precision isn’t the only metric for learning. Maybe we just needed a better target. 🎯🧊
