Got my calculator to lie

[mmbt0ne]

I typed it in exactly as you listed and also got 37000037 on my HP49G.

[SpaceAce]

Google says 37,000,019: Link

SpaceAce

[young nut]

get out and enjoy the sun, its summer [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[DiceyPlay]

Don't all calculators lie if you push the right buttons?

[thejameser]

good old excel, never lets you down.

[BruceZ]

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[ QUOTE ]
aside: the Python interpreter gives 37000018.952451177 (the same as Microsoft Excel)

[/ QUOTE ]

good old excel, never lets you down.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually it's

37000018.99999691892045945848382198708809508015441 883444890452031261651529402910555642951

according to http://www.sun-microsystems.org/BigC...lculator.shtml, which can compute it to any number of decimal places you want. That agrees with the windows calculator out the 24th decimal place, which is all the windows calculator displays. If you ask for 160 digits, the first 80 digits don't change. The idea that the displayed digits have to be inaccurate is nonsense. Designers are just lazy.

[thejameser]

unexcusable laziness.

[BruceZ]

[ QUOTE ]
Just lucky that the 32 digits carried in the Windows calculator happen to have been sufficient this time around. But it isn't that the Windows calculator is all that much smarter!

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The windows calculator makes this claim:

Extended Precision, a feature of Calculator, means that all operations are accurate to at least 32 digits. Calculator also stores rational numbers as fractions to retain accuracy. For example, 1/3 is stored as 1/3, rather than .333. However, errors accumulate during repeated operations on irrational numbers. For example, Calculator will truncate pi to 32 digits, so repeated operations on pi will lose accuracy as the number of operations increases.

[sakki]

Light-weight [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] analysis on the reasons why the results are inaccurate:
What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetics

The fact is that it's not possible to represent e.g. 1/10 or 1/3 accurately with typical binary notations.