3 ms·
> the interesting bit is that half of floats are in the interval [-1, 1] This is not so surprising once you realize that this just means you have the same prec
by vog 10y ago
> the interesting bit is that half of floats are in the interval [-1, 1]
This is not so surprising once you realize that this just means you have the same precision for 1/x as for x, which makes a lot of sense for scientific calculations.
- gugagore 10y agoI'll clarify mostly for my sake (I hadn't thought about this before) f(x) = 1/x takes takes numbers in the range (-1, 1) to numbers outside that range, and vice versa. The representable floats are split evenly between those two sets
- vog 10y agoYes, that was exactly my line of thinking. One minor nitpick: f(x)=1/x maps [-1,1] to [-inf,-1]u[+1,+inf] ... that is, 1 and -1 are in both sets and mapped onto themselves. However, this detail doesn't affect the argument much.