Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Watch Your Math! (P7 and elsewhere)

AntoniaTiger opened this issue on Dec 31, 2006 ยท 6 posts


AntoniaTiger posted Sun, 31 December 2006 at 5:18 AM

As you may have noticed, I found a change in how one of the math nodes in P7 works, compared to earlier versions. I still don't have direct access to P7, but it appears that the behavious of the Round sub-function on the math_fuction node has changed at the boundary. Coincidentally, in the RISKS Digest (also found as the comp.risks newsgroup, a thread has been running on the problem of badly coded math functions, and how little attention is being paid to checking them. This math problem has been covered in the last two or three issues, and if you're at all involved in programming of math-heavy software, you need to check it out. It doesn't matter much in Poser, but with the sort of problem reported, somebody could completely miss a planet. It's ironic that the first electronic computers were involved in calculating artillery fireing tables, and Babbages attempts at mechanical computers were an effort to fix math errors in navigation tables.