Greetings,

Not sure if my solution is worth posting.... I took a naive
axis-aligned bounding box approach.  

http://tastyspleen.net/~billk/ruby/quiz/157-smallest-circle/157_naive_aabb.rb

I knew it would be inaccurate, but I was curious how bad it
would be, so I wrote an OpenGL/GLUT based visualizer:

http://tastyspleen.net/~billk/ruby/quiz/157-smallest-circle/157_smallest_circle_visualization.rb

(The visualizer will work with any quiz solution that
provides the encircle() and generate_samples(n) methods,
and Point#x and Point#y.)


Occasionally the naive approach lucks out with a dataset
that allows it to look good:

http://tastyspleen.net/~billk/ruby/quiz/157-smallest-circle/157_vis.png

But more often it looks something like this:

http://tastyspleen.net/~billk/ruby/quiz/157-smallest-circle/157_vis_naive.png


I had planned to improve my solution by taking an approach
similar to Justin Ethier's. . . . By iterating and "moving the
circle center towards the outlier as the radius is reduced,
while all points still are within the radius."

I may still code that if I have time... but then again, it's
already been done. :)


Regards,

Bill