Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon introduced three classical probability problems including the Buffon's needle problem where the probability of a needle crossing a line on a checkerboard can be used to estimate pi. In 1901, Mario Lazzarini performed an experiment dropping a needle 3408 times and observed 1808 hits, allowing him to accurately estimate pi. The Buffon noodle problem extended this to estimate the expected number of line crossings for non-straight objects.