Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stabbles 854 days ago
I think the title is alright. The curious thing is that both `f` and `g` have catastrophic cancellation, so you expect both to be inaccurate, but magically `g` recovers from it.

Alternative title: catastrophic cancellation cancels out

1 comments

> I think the title is alright

I disagree (for the title I see now, which is “Floats are weird”). The problem isn’t about floats, but about inexact computation and, as you say, catastrophic cancellation.

If, for example, you do all your computations in 7.6 digit base 11 numbers (seven digits before the undecimal point, six after it), you get the same problem.