January 31, 2007

• Black Hat
• Cueball

#217: e to the pi Minus pi explain

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.