898
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (defector.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
82 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 38 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

They already did that with visual basic and excel. Anyone remember when excels math was, just sorta right?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    excel math is fine if you use the syntax correctly. Its problems are mostly assume many number inputs as dates and other performance issues. Doing math wrong is not one of them.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    No there were math errors. Was it using statistical functions? I can't recall, I just know we had to double check everything.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They've also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    How long back? IEEE 754 floating point was released the same year as Excel v1, and it'd be a while before there was hardware support. Floating point numbers were often dodgey back then on just about everything.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent