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yeet1-Visitor
1-Visitor
April 16, 2011
Solved

Optimizing the floating point or excluding singular points

  • April 16, 2011
  • 5 replies
  • 5591 views

Hi,

Some expressions in my sheet generate floating point errors and I would like to take as many floated decimals it can till it gets to "floating point error", precision will be less for sure but to reach the approximate analytical results I need to get pass this issue. When the floating point error generating expression is in the denominator of the expression this is percieved as a "found a singularity.." error by Mathcad. Also it would be coould if I could just tell Mathcad to exclude points which cause the singularity of the expression.

cos(expression) returns floating point error

sin(expression) returns floating point error

but tanh(expression) doesn't give any error and converges to a result. Does it make sense ?

It would do the trick for me if Mathcad performs calculations to the point it returns an error based on the hardware/architecture.I can sacrifice some precision that will not be a problem.

Thanks

Best answer by RichardJ

See the attached.

The way you are handling the matrix operations is very dangerous. Do you want element by element operations, or matrix operations? When you do a lot of vectorization on complicated expressions you have to be very careful that it is doing what you actually want it to do.

5 replies

PhilipOakley1-Visitor
1-Visitor
April 16, 2011

Yigit,

There is a misunderstanding here.

Mathcad is doing "what it says on the tin". It just isn't doing what you thought would happen.

We, as humans, can quickly abstract the essence of a problem and jump over minor inconveniences to get to the 'right' answer. These include knowing that we can have a term that looks like infinity divided by (the same) infinity and 'know' that the answer will be unity (one). Mathcad (and especially its numeric engine calculations, which are limited to double precision floating point) doesn't know that.

in your case you have asked for the sine of a complex number. When you use sin(x) = (exp(ix) - exp(-ix))/(2i) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trigonometric_identities you should be able to see that if you have a large imaginary component to 'x' then you get an extra real exp(Imaginary_term) added onto your magnitude. Thus the sine becomes much greater than unity. In your case the multiplier is so large that it is bigger than the maximum number that can be represented by a floating point number - hence the (correct for mathcad) error report.

You should have a look at the effect of passing imaginary terms into the sin function. if the term is a pure imaginary (real part is zero), then you are simply asking for the sinh() hyperbolic function to be evaluated which ,as as you may know, zooms off to infinity.

The tan() function works because it (the mathcad implementation) has already taken care of the ratio between the sin/cos and evaluates it 'nicely'

Philip

yeet1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
April 16, 2011

Yes tanh seems to be evaluating but when used in recursive and dependence functions it generates the error.Individually tanh(expression) evaluates but not in the case I mentioned above.Please see the attachement.

RichardJ19-TanzaniteAnswer
19-Tanzanite
April 16, 2011

See the attached.

The way you are handling the matrix operations is very dangerous. Do you want element by element operations, or matrix operations? When you do a lot of vectorization on complicated expressions you have to be very careful that it is doing what you actually want it to do.

Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
23-Emerald I
April 16, 2011

I can't help answer your question, but

You don't need to define j as the square root of -1. Mathcad will recognise imaginary numbers. You get an imaginary number by typing 1j (or 1i) with no multiplier between them.

The complex number 4 + 5i

is entered by typing 4 (plus) 5 (times) 1j [(plus) is + and (times) is *]

The real answer to your question is somewhere in the mathematics or the implimentation of the algorithms.

THis is one of the times when we should all wish Tom Gutman hadn't given up on this forum.

RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
April 16, 2011
Some expressions in my sheet generate floating point errors and I would like to take as many floated decimals it can till it gets to "floating point error",

The problem is not the number of digits, it's the magnitude of the number. The numbers are larger than the floating point processor can handle.

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