9 Nov
2007
9 Nov
'07
3 p.m.
On Nov 9, 2007 11:30 AM, Brent Yorgey
More generally, this is due to the fact that floating-point numbers can only have finite precision
This popped up on reddit recently: http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/transcendental_meditation . Interestingly, AMD did apparently figure out how to reduce modulo 2*pi much more accurately but doing the right thing broke too many applications. So it's not quite as simple as "floating-point numbers can only have finite precision", the errors are worse than they need to be. (But I haven't read the K5 paper and so this information is all second hand.) -- Dan