| Submission declined on 29 October 2024 by HitroMilanese (talk). This submission is not adequately supported by reliable sources. Reliable sources are required so that information can be verified. If you need help with referencing, please see Referencing for beginners and Citing sources.
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
|  |
( questions to reviewers, to be removed before publish:
I didn't intent to re-invent the wheel or re-write other sources, this article is intended as sort of hint, and at 0.30000000000000004.com people interested can get further info.
I don't know about any more reliable source than the original IEEE paper for the standard, acc. your request I added the weitz IEEE calculator and 'Goldberg' as sources, can't say if they will make it in the references list.
Hope to be qualified now :-) )
0.30000000000000004 is the result in the most common example used on the internet to demonstrate small deviations between human common decimal fractions math and computer common binary floating point arithmetic.
The example is that 0.2 + 0.1 results in 0.30000000000000004 in binary floating-point with the most common datatype IEEE 754[1] 'double' ( binary64 ).
These deviations evolve because the binary datatypes can't exactly represent most of decimal fractions but use approximated binary deputies.
Thus the calculation becomes 0.2000000000000000111022... + 0.1000000000000000055511... , the binary exact result 0.3000000000000000166533... isn't representable in the datatype, would require 54 bit of significand where only 53 are available, and thus becomes rounded to a representable value, 0.3000000000000000444089... for which the 'SRT' ( Shortest Round Tripping ) decimal correspondent is 0.30000000000000004 .
For verification one can use the IEEE 754 Calculator from Prof. Weitz, HAW Hamburg, it can be found at [1]
In e.g. spreadsheets it needs some efforts to demonstrate these deviations, they cover up by e.g. only displaying 15 significant digits.
More Info about this type of deviation and background can be found at Goldberg: 'What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic': [2] or on a less scientific level at: 'What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic' [3]
The problem / example has got it's own website: 'Floating Point Math', 0.30000000000000004.com[4] .
A funny while not exact in every detail video about it can be found on youtube: 'Why do computers suck at math?' [5]
It is not! the only example, but one of myriads of similar deviations, it's not only additions but all types of calculations affected, and not all problem cases involve rounding, e.g. 4.4 + 2.2 -> 6.6000000000000005 fails without.
The deviations are often considered neglectable as being very very very small, that's right but they may stack up, multiply up, or even 'exponentionally explode' and then harm usability of computer calculated results.
References
edit- ^ 754-2019 - IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic ( caution: paywall ). 2019. doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.2019.8766229. ISBN 978-1-5044-5924-2. Retrieved 2024-10-29.