Re:Floating point error is the least of my worries (2011)
by mehrdadn on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @09:33PM
(#16434757)
How does that contradict what the parent was saying? Parent said problems like this can come up where you least expect it, and you rebutted that "this is not a real world situation" because "any real system that accepted a 'parallel' condition like this would have to check for it"? If anything you're confirming the point, not refuting it.
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Re:Floating point error is the least of my worries (2011)
by ajross on Thursday February 22, 2018 @01:10AM
(#16435505)
This is a carefully constructed (malformed) problem presented in an obfuscated way. It didn't "just happen" that those ~20 bit numbers happen to produce slopes that differ only after ~57 bits, come on. If you're going to do that kind of trickery, you can come up with an equivalent that blows up any fixed precision limit and/or explodes the representation size for any arbitrary precision computation system.
It's a parlor trick, not a serious problem.