On Sunday, 15 May 2016 at 18:30:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Can you provide an example of a legitimate algorithm that
produces degraded results if the precision is increased?
I've just been observing this argument (over and over again) and
I think the two sides are talking about different things.
Walter, you keep saying degraded results.
The scientific folks keep saying *consistent* results.
Think about a key goal in scientific experiments: to measure
changes across repeated experiments, to reproduce and confirm or
falsify results. They want to keep as much equal as they can.
I suppose people figure if they use the same compiler, same build
options, same source code and feed the same data into it, they
expect to get the *same* results. It is a deterministic machine,
right?
You might argue they should add "same hardware" to that list, but
apparently it isn't that easy, or I doubt people would be talking
about this.
