Timeline for Represent a real number without loss of precision
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
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| Jul 12, 2014 at 16:12 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' | @AndrejBauer This answer is correct, and saying the same thing as yours, albeit with a lot less information. You cannot represent all real numbers in a computer. You can represent any real number, but not all at once. If anything, I would dispute that you can represent “many”, since you can only represent finitely many in any given computer, and only almost none (in the mathematical sense) in an abstract computer that is equivalent to the usual computation models (Turing machine equivalent). | |
| Jul 12, 2014 at 11:50 | comment | added | Andrej Bauer | A countable amount of bits suffices, first of all, and since you don't need all of them at once, nor are you able to process them all at once, they can be stored in time as well as space. | |
| Jul 12, 2014 at 11:48 | comment | added | Alice Ryhl | @AndrejBauer So you are suggesting there is a data structure that can represent any real number? Any such data structure would have to use an uncountable infinite amount of bits to represent any number. | |
| Jul 12, 2014 at 11:26 | comment | added | Andrej Bauer | This again is a false answer, produced out of ignorance. There is a whole area of exact real arithmetic which studies how to represent all reals by suitable data structures. | |
| Jul 12, 2014 at 9:39 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 12, 2014 at 12:55 | |||||
| Jul 12, 2014 at 9:21 | history | answered | Alice Ryhl | CC BY-SA 3.0 |