Interesting Math Problem

[Lie]

On Jun 6, 2:25 am, "Rüdiger Werner" <larud... at freenet.de> wrote:
> "BEES INC" <bees.... at gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitragnews:mailman.105.1212653740.1044.python-list at python.org...
> ...
>
> Problem: Star Ratings
>
> People can rate cheeseburgers on my website with a star rating of 0-5
> stars (whole stars only), 5 being mighty tasty and 0 being disgusting.
> I would like to show the average of everyone's ratings of a particular
> cheeseburger to the nearest half star. I have already calculated the
> average rating as a float (star_sum) and the total number of people
> that rated the particular cheeseburger (num_raters). The result should
> be stored as a float in a variable named "stars."
> My Solution (in Python):
>
> Well seems this is a typical half even rounding problem.
>
> See
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-April/485889.html
>
> for a long discussion
>
> However since your problem looks like a typical homework problem i made my
> example
> buggy by intention.
>
> However the result should be correct.
>
> have fun!
>
> def myround(x):
>     d, m = divmod(x, 2)
>     return 2*d + round(m - 1) + 1
>
> num = 1.5
> for _i in xrange(30):
>     print num, ' -> ', myround(num * 2)/2
>     num -= 0.1
>
> >pythonw -u "test18.py"
>
> 1.5  ->  1.5
> 1.4  ->  1.5
> 1.3  ->  1.5
> 1.2  ->  1.0
> 1.1  ->  1.0
> 1.0  ->  1.0
> 0.9  ->  1.0
> 0.8  ->  1.0
> 0.7  ->  0.5
> 0.6  ->  0.5
> 0.5  ->  0.5
> 0.4  ->  0.5
> 0.3  ->  0.5
> 0.2  ->  0.0
> 0.1  ->  0.0
> -1.94289029309e-016  ->  0.0    < --- hint for bug
> -0.1  ->  0.0
> -0.2  ->  0.0
> -0.3  ->  -0.5
> -0.4  ->  -0.5
> -0.5  ->  -0.5
> -0.6  ->  -0.5
> -0.7  ->  -0.5
> -0.8  ->  -1.0
> -0.9  ->  -1.0
> -1.0  ->  -1.0
> -1.1  ->  -1.0
> -1.2  ->  -1.0
> -1.3  ->  -1.5
> -1.4  ->  -1.5
>
> >Exit code: 0
>
> to avoid the bug have a look at:
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-April/485934.html
>
> and try this example:
>
> num = 3
> for _i in xrange(num * 10,-num *10, -1):
>     if myround(float(_i)/10) != myround(num):
>         print num, " -> ", myround(num ), " --- ",  myround(float(_i)/10)
>         print "-----"
>     num -= 0.1

Well, I don't think that's the problem. I don't think the OP cares
what the rounding method is, it doesn't really matters that much in
this case since this function is only used for output and the
underlying rating value is untouched.

In that case, try this:

  from __future__ import division

  rating = round(star_sum / num_raters)
  whole, half = divmod(rating, 2)