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51 points

Don’t be irrational

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10 points

But floating-point notation also can’t precisely represent irrational numbers…

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1 point

What superior method do you propose?

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12 points
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Following Pythagoreanism and believing irrational numbers to be blasphemous. They’re represented by being struck down by the gods.

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1 point

Symbolical computation is cool

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1 point

But some irrational numbers are only so in base 10

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9 points

What? That’s not true at all…

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Kinda. Technicaly no since an irrational number is a number that cannot be defined as a ratio of 2 existing rational numbers. Any number that can be represented in any rational base can by definition be represented as a ratio of somthing/base^n. This ignore the case of an irrational base but its practically useless cos any rational and most other irrational numbers will be irrational.

What u think ur trying to say is that some numbers cannot be represented in one base but can in another for example 1/3 can be represented as a decimal in base 3 but cannot jn base 10 ie u get 0.333(3 repeating forever).

Tieing back to floating point which uses base 2 u end up with simmillar issues with base10 base2 conversions hence most of the errors with floating point errors (yes at very large and very small numbers u lose accuracy but in practice most errors arise from base convention).

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