gors@well.UUCP (Gordon Stewart) (06/22/89)
I proposed this to Chris Finn, but he didn't seem to like it much. Consider the following (simple-minded) solution, which does not blow up in the case of a "bad" set of points, can't generate any floating point errors, and generally provides "good" results. The goodness can be quantified after the fact, and for the application I envision -- fitting a circle to a set of hand-drawn points -- is plenty good enuf: Choose the barycenter of the set of points as the center of the circle; Choose the mean distance from the barycenter to be the radius. -- Michael Sierchio (en guise de Gordon Stewart) {pacbell, hoptoad, pyramid, hplabs}!well!gors gors@well.UUCP