December 17, 2005

Funny Google rounding error …

Posted in Category: Work — Amr Awadallah @ 4:24 am | link | | comment (0)

Try this search on Google: 1 – 0.9 – 0.1

the answer they give is: 1 – 0.9 – 0.1 = -2.77555756 × 10-17

of course the right answer is zero, which is what Yahoo Search gives:

1 – 0.9 – 0.1 = 0

to illustrate the problem with Google rounding:

1 / ((1 – 0.9 – 0.1) * (10^17)) = -0.36028797

when the right answer should be infinity, however yahoo gives this same wrong answer too:

1/((1 – 0.9 – 0.1) * (10^17)) = -0.3602879702

— amr

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