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Comment on More Intuitive Calculator Arithmetic (2018)parent

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Yeah, a float isn't a number, it's a number with an error bar.

One awkwardness with interval arithmetic is that after twenty or thirty multiplications the error bar can get large enough to make the answer not useful.

Twenty or thirty is not a large number in many reasonable calculations, for instance with finite element calculations or Markov chanis.

This is actually a really important factor that a lot of code just ignores. Floats are decent general purpose numbers for a lot of uses but they come with a whole bunch of caveats where you can lose a lot of precision really fast.

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