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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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How can you make a calculator more precise? It's either correct or not, right?
A ti-84 would never inform you about the white genocide in South Africa though
All computers are guesstimating when they do math with decimals, fractions, and irrational numbers. Binary data storage forces you to store a number in a base-2 form and in a limited amount of space. Irrationals can't be written down in a limited amount of space without losing data, and decimals and fractions frequently don't play nice if you try and convert them to binary (which is why 0.333... + 0.3333... in a computer is 6.666667).
You boost precision on these operations by either using more memory per number (which is more precise but still has error) or devising a data structure that can losslessly store the numbers and operations (but is much much larger in memory and also way slower).
Thank you, I didn't know that
There are symbolic calculators as well. Computers can solve a good amount of math precisely even when it's not integer or base2 floating points.
Yep, I mentioned that as using more complex data structures. A computer can do calculus or algebra but you're going to need to represent the problem with an abstract syntax or expression tree and a set of rules to apply to the tree, which takes up a helluva lot more space than raw types like integers and floats.
I don't want to test your knowledge, I'm just concerned that your comment comes across as computers have always been bad at math, LLMs getting math questions wrong is nothing to new.
Computers are cracked at math.
0.6666667 is just rounding that's thought to school children too. Honestly floating point math gets a lot worse than that, for example
1.1 * 3. But that's still standardized exact behavior.BUT CAN THEY SOLVE IT ACCURATELY
It's a joke, even among the AI evangelists.
We're conflating precision and accuracy here. Precision is more decimal places. Accuracy is actually being closer to correct.