January 31, 2007
#217: e to the pi Minus pi
Person: Hey, check it out: e^pi-pi is 19.999099979. That’s weird.
Hat Guy: Yeah. That’s how I got kicked out of the ACM in college.
Person: . . . what?
Hat Guy: During a competition, I told the programmers on our team that e^pi-pi was a standard test of floating-point handlers–it would come out to 20 unless they had rounding errors.
Person: That’s awful.
Hat Guy: Yeah, they dug through half their algorithms looking for the bug before they figured it out.
{{alt text: Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2 + 19^2
- is pi.