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roystgnr comments on Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers - Less Wrong Discussion

62 Post author: Louie 09 January 2013 02:33PM

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Comment author: roystgnr 09 January 2013 08:55:23PM 6 points [-]

"Getting the right answer" doesn't really describe numerical analysis. I'd have said "Recognizing when you're going to get the wrong answer, and getting a controllable upper bound on how wrong". The book you list seems typical: only one chapter even begins by discussing an exact rather than an approximate method, and the meat of that chapter is about how badly the error can blow up when you try to use that method with inexact floating-point arithmetic.