Well, gang, I lasted half an hour doing real work before nerdsniping myself. Might have pretty pictures to share in a mo
In reply to @christianp
So, @robeastaway tweeted, which made me think about zequals.
It's his brilliant time-saving device: when doing arithmetic, forget about all the digits after the first one.
For example, 123 z≈ 100.
You can look at the relative error of zequals compared to doing it precisely
In reply to @christianp
If even the different kinds of digit are too much to keep in your head, you can also do zequals in binary. Here's what that looks like:
In reply to @christianp
But I'm always looking for ways to do worse. So, what if you did zequals, but instead of keeping the most significant digit, you kept the least significant (non-zero) one? I'll call that 'meequals',
For example, 123 m= 300.
What does the relative error of that look like?
In reply to @christianp
It looks like this! The error changes drastically from one number to the next, but you can still see the fractal-ish pattern. That's interesting!
But don't let the scaling on the plot fool you: this method is way, way worse than zequals.
