approximation - Base Six https://base6.com/ James Furness's blog Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:08:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.1 Calculating floating point epsilon/precision in Java https://base6.com/2010/06/24/calculating-floating-point-epsilonprecision-in-java/ Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:25:44 +0000 https://base6.com/?p=96 Floating point arithmetic/rounding can be somewhat painful, made worse by the fact that the epsilon (error) in the machine representation of floating point varies depending on the exponent (i.e. how large/small the number being represented is): Normalized numbers when Base = 2, Precision = 3, Exponents = -1 to 2 [Goldberg91] A very comprehensive paper […]

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]]> Floating point arithmetic/rounding can be somewhat painful, made worse by the fact that the epsilon (error) in the machine representation of floating point varies depending on the exponent (i.e. how large/small the number being represented is):

Normalized numbers when Base = 2, Precision = 3, Exponents = -1 to 2 [Goldberg91]

A very comprehensive paper (from which the above image is taken) is available here. In previous teams we have implemented our own functions to derive an approximation of the epsilon from the number to be represented, however I discovered recently to my surprise that such a function was added to Java in 1.5: Math.ulp!

The post Calculating floating point epsilon/precision in Java first appeared on Base Six.

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