+- HP Forums (https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum)
+-- Forum: HP Calculators (and very old HP Computers) (/forum-3.html)
+--- Forum: Articles Forum (/forum-14.html)
+--- Thread: The Four Meanings of "Accurate to 3 Places" (/thread-9661.html)
The Four Meanings of "Accurate to 3 Places" - Joe Horn - 12-09-2017 10:03 PM
What is the square root of 84, accurate to 3 places? Although this sounds like a trivial question, it is not, because it has 4 different answers, each of which is correct, depending on what "accurate to 3 places" is taken to mean. Furthermore, all 4 meanings of "accurate to 3 places" are useful and perfectly valid meanings.
This fact throws a very large monkey wrench into the design of any calculator's "decimal to fraction" feature. Hence it was the subject of a presentation at HHC 2011, which analyzed the problem, its cause, and its effects, and suggested some solutions.
Although the presentation revolved around a PowerPoint slide show, it was written up in readable form for inclusion in the HHC Proceedings. That paper can be found here: http://hhuc.us/2011/The-Four-Meanings-of-Accurate-to-3-Places.pdf
This came to mind during a recent discussion regarding the differences between the outputs of the HP Prime's [a b/c] fraction button and its new QPI function.