This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Archit Sharma
I discovered something strange when experimenting with JavaScript a few days ago, so I did some research and found my answers.
I'm writing this article in the hopes that some of you will find it useful or may learn something new.
I used to believe that computers were better at math than humans, until I tried adding 0.1 + 0.2 and got the result 0.30000000000000004 in my browser console.
Then I performed this comparison 0.1+0.2===0.3 and got the output false.
I initially believed it was a bug in JavaScript, so I attempted the same thing in Java and Python and had the same result in both.
After doing a lot of research, I concluded this is not an bug.
I found out this is math: floating-point arithmetic.
Let's go a little deeper to see what's going on behind the scenes.
Computers have a limited amount of memory and so they need to make a trade-of between range and precision.
Numbers in JavaScript should be stored within 64 bits, which means we can have integers accurate up to 15 digits and a maximum of 17 numbers after the decimal point. It is called a floating point because there is no fixed number of digits before or after the decimal point, allowing it to represent a wide range of numbers both big and small.
The problem is that computer use a Base-2 system i.e. binary while humans use a Base-10 system that leads to rounding errors when all the memory has been used up.
This is the reason behind getting 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004.
Thank you for reading this article; I have not detailed the entire math behind it, but only enough for you to comprehend what's going on.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Archit Sharma
Archit Sharma | Sciencx (2022-07-25T14:14:13+00:00) Why do computers suck at math?. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/07/25/why-do-computers-suck-at-math-2/
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