this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
250 points (97.7% liked)

xkcd

8590 readers
143 users here now

A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8653164


Transcript:

Cueball: Hey, check it out: e^π^−π is 19.999099979. That's weird.
Black Hat: Yeah. That's how I got kicked out of the ACM in college.
Cueball: ...what?

Black Hat: During a competition, I told the programmers on our team that e^π^−π was a standard test of floating-point handlers -- it would come out to 20 unless they had rounding errors.

Cueball: That's awful.
Black Hat: Yeah, they dug through half their algorithms looking for the bug before they figured it out.

Hover text:

Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2^ + 19^2^/22) is pi.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Shurimal@kbin.social 10 points 8 months ago

Not gonna lie, had to test it for myself, using emulated MK 61/54 calculator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cax.pmk.ext/

Got 19.999097. Rounding errors or a bug in the microcode, who knows.