high precision mathematics

[Karl M. Syring]

"Paul Rubin" <phr-n2002a at nightsong.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:7xpu2zdzhh.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com...
> "Karl M. Syring" <syring at email.com> writes:
> > But this is really dilettantic work and NASA today is an organization
run by
> > amateurs. If you look at real computational geometry programs like CGAL,
you
> > can see, how it is done.
> > Anyway, it is not necessary to appeal to authorities to get a grasp of
the
> > problem.: Imagine, you have a polygon in the plane and you do a series
of
> > rotations and translations on it. Now, you want to know whether the
position
> > is exactly identical to another polygon. If you do this with floating
point,
> > you will never get an exact result, while in rational coordinates you
always
> > will.
>
> Physical simulations and computational geometry don't have much in common.

Think of simulating a robot arm that does a brain operation on you. I think
you would immediately turn to proper rational number coordinates.

Karl M. Syring