My first newbie WP 34S question

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

(01-09-2014 06:38 PM)Dieter Wrote:  

(01-09-2014 06:07 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  I just ran Mike Sebastian's calculator forensics test (...) and got the very impressive result 9.00000000003, which may be the best yet.

It should return 9,00000 00000 29361. I assume you know how to display more than 12 digits on a 34s. ;-)

Just to be sure: there is a common misunderstanding regarding the calculator forensics test. A result close to 9 does not mean best accuracy. In fact, there is one single "perfect" result for every number of significant digits, and it usually is different from 9. The forensics test was not intended for accuracy checks. It was supposed to help the user identify the hardware (and firmware) built into various calculators.

A simple program that returns the "perfect" result for most cases can be found at the beginning of a discussion in the old forum that deals with the behaviour of the 34s RSD function (which has been corrected in the meantime). Switch your 34s to double precision (DBLON) and see what you get for 10, 12 and 16 digits.

So if a 12-digit calculator returns exactly 9 or something very close to 9, there must be something wrong: if each and every intermediate result is perfectly rounded to 12 digits, the perfect final result should be 8,99999864267.

Dieter

Very nice wp34s program! I would have loved to have a wp34s calculator and your program back in 2006 :-)

http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/...ead=103151

Regards,

Gerson.