Re: Accuracy and Precision
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37058] Re: Accuracy and Precision
- From: pkosta2002 at yahoo.com (Peter Kosta)
- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 05:26:16 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <anp065$qtb$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Andrzej Kozlowski <andrzej at tuins.ac.jp> wrote in message news:<anp065$qtb$1 at smc.vnet.net>...
> On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 06:01 PM, DrBob wrote:
>
>[...]
>
> I would say this is correct and show that SetPrecision is very useful
> indeed. It tells you (what of course you ought to already know in this
> case anyway) that machine precision will not give you a realiable
> answer in this case. If you know your numbers with a great deal of
> accuracy you can get an accurate answer:
>
> In[24]:=
> f = SetAccuracy[333.75*b^6 + a^2*(11*a^2*b^2 - b^6 -
> 121*b^4 - 2) + 5.5*b^8 + a/(2*b), 100];
> a=SetPrecision[77617.,100]; b = SetPrecision[33096.,100];
>
>
> In[26]:=
> {f, Precision[f]}
>
> Out[26]=
> {-0.82739605994682136814116509547981629199903311578438481991\
> 781484167246798617832`61.2597, 61}
>
Congratulations! You just requested accuracy of 100 for f and got 61 (
to convince yourself add Accuracy[f] to In[26]). If In[24] one
replaces SetAccuracy by SetPrecision the result is similar.
PK
> Again you can be pretty sure that you got an accurate answer, provided
> of course your original setting of precision was valid.
>
> Honestly, to say that SetPrecision and SetAccuaracy are useless is one
> of the silliest thing I have read on this list in years.
>
>
> >
> Andrzej Kozlowski
> Yokohama, Japan
> http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~akoz/
> http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/
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