cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8653164
Transcript:
Cueball: Hey, check it out: eπ−π is 19.999099979. That’s weird.
Black Hat: Yeah. That’s how I got kicked out of the ACM in college.
Cueball: …what?Black Hat: During a competition, I told the programmers on our team that eπ−π was a standard test of floating-point handlers – it would come out to 20 unless they had rounding errors.
Cueball: That’s awful.
Black Hat: Yeah, they dug through half their algorithms looking for the bug before they figured it out.
Hover text:
Also, I hear the 4th root of (92 + 192/22) is pi.
I get that it’s a comic but this doesn’t feel like a conversation that would ever occur in real life. Granted I don’t hang out with programmers or mathematicians so maybe it’s more plausible than you would think.
This is totally a conversation that would happen in real life. I’ve watched a friend of mine try to convince someone who had a bit much to drink that the primes are closed under multiplication for an hour. Absolutely hysterical
My kid is studying physics in university, and she comes home and tells me physics anecdotes which I don’t understand, so I always reply “That’s Numberwang!”.
So I can see these types of conversations happening between math and programming types.