Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Floating point arithmetic is not associative...

Especially in computational geometry, robust calculations are of paramount importance because of the algebraic calculations at the heart of most geometric algorithms, and the catastrophic effects of precision errors - you lose incidences, points disappear, algorithms crash, the universe slips into a black hole....

An old article by David Goldberg talks of the perils of floating point computations. Worth reading...
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating Point Arithmetic

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