for sure a problem that, as the social impact of our machines is evident, should be an issue of global concern. The issue of where to round a number is equally an interesting one, never have we been living in a world that is less black and white, yet the tendency to ignore the greyscales is as much a genetic one as a concerning one.
I am writing not from a pure programmers point of view, but as designer, artist,researcher. parseInt(me)? Or this one for a little story, a few Macromedia Flash versions ago, a bug caused a movieclicp(graphic) to slowly shrink and eventually dissapear if you would spin it with the command grfx._rotation = grfx._rotation + 1 This was caused by rounding errors when rescaling then spinning grfx. It might just as well have oversized it to infinity, yet it did the opposite. marCus > The trouble with rounding floating point numbers. > > So, Prudence, computers do make mistakes� > By Dan Clarke. > > We all know of floating point numbers, so much so that we reach for them > each time we write code that does math. But do we ever stop to think > what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really > trust it? > > I hate to cast aspersions on its good name but when I hear stories of > space craft crashing, inconsistent information on bank statements and > pensioners being short changed (all of which have happened: see, for > example, Risks Digest entries here and here), I start to realise that > there is a real danger of misusing floating point numbers. Indeed, > anyone with a few years of experience under their belt will probably > have either had the pleasure of dealing with a floating-point related > bug; or have watched a colleague slowly go crazy over one. > > Often, the underlying cause of such problems falls into common > categories: a division by zero or a narrowing conversion that loses > information. Other times however, it's not so evident � sometimes the > cause is the futile attempt of a software developer to round a > floating-point number. > > 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? > > more... > http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/08/12/floating_point_approximation/ > _______________________________________________ > 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
