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Printing floating point numbers with Gargi Sharma

Gargi Sharma on July 23, 2020

I am a software engineer who contributes to OCaml open source at Tarides. Previously, I worked at Bloomberg, Uber, and eBay. I also attended the Re...

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Ben Halpern • Jul 23 '20

There is so much I really don't understand about this subject. Already learning some stuff in the first couple mins 😄

Abhishek Sharma • Jul 23 '20 • Edited

My favorite demo on importance of machine epsilon:

~
def f(x):
if x <= 1/2:
return 2 * x
if x > 1/2:
return 2*x - 1

x = 1/10
for i in range(80):
print(x)
x = f(x)
~

Paula • Jul 23 '20

This is so interesting, so cool to better understand how maths work under the higher programming levels we are used to work with! thank you to take the time to explain to us! loving it

Dangeranger • Jul 23 '20

Fun fact, there are more numbers between 0 and 1, than there are integers above 0.

Omar • Jul 23 '20

Thanks , Every computer scientist out there including me will be happy to watch this!

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Jul 23 '20

I wonder why they're all dragon related haha

Gargi Sharma • Jul 23 '20

I think it's a tribute to the first algorithm! The first one was called Dragon4 because of the Dragon curve and the folds & peaks in the making of a dragon curve and others followed tradition. :)

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Jul 23 '20

Ahh that makes sense! Interesting!

Linda Thompson • Jul 23 '20

Good job! I never really thought about computers doing floating point math based in binary instead of decimal.....no wonder it always works so weird!!