I would say you're right that the error would be too small to notice. I once upon a time wanted to zoom *really far* into the mandelbrot set - further than floats, further than doubles, and further than long doubles, and so tried arbitary precision maths. Unfortunately, even in the initial view of the m-set, the maths proved too slow to be workable (unless you've a world simulater I guess).
jwm. On 15/8/2006, "Marcus Kirsch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >i guess doubles are then the variable equivalent of butterflies then ....... >my question as uninitiated would be was the error gone or just so small >now that it didnt remain visible > >marCus > >> Quoting marc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> >>> That's right, one of the most basic operations in math, a thing that >>> we learn to do before we can ride a bike, eludes the combined efforts >>> of the finest engineers over the last 30 years. Of course, this is >>> something that is intuitively nonsensical - why should it be >>> impossible to round a floating-point number reliably? >> >> Real mathematics programmers use bignums. ;-) >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bignum >> >> I remember the first time I saw a floating point rounding error. A >> student I was >> teaching was rotating a vector shape on the screen by multiplying the >> angle by a >> fraction in a loop. The numbers were stored as C floats. As the shape >> rotated it >> started to drift off-centre. I had difficulty believing that floats were >> the >> problem given the low ranges being used, but after asking the maths >> lecturer's >> advice we switched the code from using floats to using doubles. The shape >> then >> rotated without drifting. >> >> - Rob. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> NetBehaviour mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour >> > > >-- >Marcus Kirsch >MA (RCA) Interaction Designer and Technoartist >London, UK > >+44 (0) 7950 177633 >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >_______________________________________________ >NetBehaviour mailing list >[email protected] >http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > > _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
