On 5/27/22 9:26 PM, newbie nullzwei via gnumeric-list wrote:
In my double version tan(pi()/2) fails with 16331239353195370 instead of the reference 16324552277619072, tan(3/2*pi()) and the negative values fail too, exotic processor? messed up system? updated libraries??? how reliable are the references?
1) See my previous message from 5/28/22 12:43 AM. 2) Here is more detail about how I think about it. Consider the following rational numbers: 7074237752028437 / 4503599627370496 7074237752028438 / 4503599627370496 7074237752028439 / 4503599627370496 7074237752028440 / 4503599627370496 7074237752028441 / 4503599627370496 7074237752028442 / 4503599627370496 7074237752028443 / 4503599627370496 The denominator is the same for all, and is a power of 2. In fact, all those rationals are representable as IEEE doubles. Representable exactly. Furthermore, they are consecutive, adjacent IEEE doubles. The FPU on my laptop does very good job of calculating the cotangent of these rational numbers. The results are shown here: https://av8n.com/computer/img48/trig-function-accuracy.png Forsooth, the accuracy is very much better than can be depicted on such a graph. I'm not sure that all 64 bits of the result are always correct, but I'm not sure they're not. (I have not researched this. The conventional explanation is that the FPU does the calculation with a "few" guard digits and then rounds the result. So in rare marginal cases the last bit could get rounded the wrong way, compared to what you would get with "more" guard digits. This happens on top of the much larger inevitable rounding error. So it is both rare and immaterial. It cannot possibly be important in practical applications.) Mathematically, cot(π/2) is zero. The FPU cannot compute this for the exceedingly simple reason that the abscissa (π) cannot be represented as an IEEE double. It is somewhere close to 7074237752028438.275766 / 4503599627370496 which is definitely not representable. This is shown by the + symbol in the middle of the diagram. Not being able to compute cot(π/2) has got nothing to do with the accuracy of the FPU computation. To repeat, it does a very good job on all the abscissas you can actually feed it. There is no point in even asking what the FPU does with abscissas that it cannot possibly be given. For numbers this close to π/2, you can compute the cotangent to high accuracy using two terms of the Taylor series. Or in lots of other ways. The main thing you need is a verrry accurate representation of π/2. If you are interested in the tangent, you can compute the cotangent and then take the reciprocal. I have a maxima script that maps this out in lurid detail. _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list gnumeric-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
