Example of a floating point error bug from today that fixed point wouldn’t have helped: I’m calculating the bisector of two vectors a and b. |a|b + b|a| is numerically unstable if vectors are nearly opposite (and fails entirely if vectors are exactly opposite).
-
-
Yeah that operation will murder your precision. I remember our fourth year Physics class where the prof taught computational mathematics tricks. The lecture on recovering precision was almost 100% ranting about subtracting nearly-equal numbers lol.
-
Yup, and the important thing is that fixed point doesn’t help. In fact, it can make it worse! Fixed point is not magical-numerical-stability fairy dust :)
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.