MATLAB: Element wise multiplication .* rounding problem

matlab element wise multiplication .* rounding problemsymbolicSymbolic Math Toolbox

Hello,
My name is Robin and I am currently using Matlab to compute some calculations.
But I have an issue. Let's take :
M = 564;
P = sin(5);
disp((M.*10.*P) - (M.*(10.*P)));
The result should be 0. Instead I get :
ans = 9.0949e-13
I understand the gap is very small, but I think Matlab rounding algorithm should finally provide 0.
Can you help me ?

Best Answer

Nope. It does not. Welcome to the wild, whacky wonderful world of floating point numbers and arithmetic. A place where computations are only an approximation to mathematics, a model thereof. Where things like the associative law, the distributtive laws of arithmetic are only approximately true. A place where you need to learn to use tolerances on results, where you need to never trust the least significant bits of a result, at least not until you know, absolutely, because you fully understand the computations, what is happening. And even then, tolerances are still a good safety net, a good idea.
MATLAB does not automatically round everything that you do, expecting that a small number found really should be exactly zero. If it did, it would then introduce potential inaccuracies, even beyond those created by the use of floating point numbers themselves.
And if it did, do you think a chemist would be happy to see the reciprocal of Avogadro's number always be shown as exactly zero?
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