Re: back to the roots
On 2013-06-29 07:16:51 -0700, G. William (Bill) Walster wrote:
> I agree that in situations, such as your example, when you are evaluating a
> monotonic function over an interval and therefore can use endpoint
> evaluation, extra precision can be useful. However, surely, this is not the
> general case. It can be a huge mistake to use input numbers that are only
> good to 4 or 5 decimal digits of accuracy and then interpret them as
> infinitely precise, as Ulrich himself did in his note about the steam
> turbine that blew up and killed 6 people.
It isn't necessarily a mistake to regard such inputs as exact, as
long as at the end, one remembers that they weren't. But wanting to
get exact results from them (such as with the EDP) is a bad idea in
general, since it takes resources (time and memory) and is not really
useful.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)