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
No comments:
Post a Comment