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cubefox • today at 7:32 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

So what? Using something that can carry out "exact complex arithmetic" is even more wrong.


Replies

eru • today at 8:30 AM

Why? It's just a model.

And exact arithmetic on Q + i*Q (complex numbers but the coordinates are rational numbers, not real numbers) is perfectly feasible.

Of course, in a real computer, long rational numbers take longer to manipulate than short rational numbers. But it's just a model. Similar to how we often assume we can handle arbitrary integers in unit time, but in reality longer integers also take longer to handle on a real computer (or we just refuse to handle them and stick to u64 only.)

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