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piuvas | 3 years ago

I don't understand how it's 99.9999% accurate if it's infinitely long

discuss

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EmilioMartinez|3 years ago

Accuracy is best thought as relative, though the usage of percentages here is not a good fit imho. You compare your result to the wanted value by dividing the error by the value. In this case |x - √2|/√2 < 0.000001 (or 0.0001% if you insist)

For comparison, the initial value of the iteration (1.2) would be 85% accurate, which without context might sounds like a lot but is pretty abysmal

piuvas|3 years ago

Ah, thank you very much for the explanation!