Do I exaggerate by calling it “heartbreak” or would “disillusionment” be better?
The latter implies enlightenment of a sort, as one’s illusions fall away. The former suggests one still needs to heal.
I’m talking about that day you discover that computers are using “fuzzy numbers” that don’t give the same results as the manual methods you used in school.
Are computers really all that great if they don’t get the right answers, according to the rules you were taught to follow?
Where does this six come from, on the last line?
>>> a = 0.1 >>> a
0.1
>>> a**10
1.0000000000000006e-10
IEEE 754, a standard for binary computers, is unable to represent some powers of 10 without a repeat-forever pattern, meaning the round trip, from decimal to binary and back, is inevitably lossy.
The perennial issue of “incommensurability” lurks behind this great divide between the ubiquitous floating point standard (IEEE 754) and various binary coded decimal (BCD) libraries.
There’s that age-old tension between infinite precision and the indefinite finitude of Universe. Integrated circuits inhabit the world of finitude, as do any and all discrete phenomena.
