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Concept
Machine epsilon
Summary
Machine epsilon or machine precision is an upper bound on the relative approximation error due to rounding in floating point arithmetic. This value characterizes computer arithmetic in the field of numerical analysis, and by extension in the subject of computational science. The quantity is also called macheps and it has the symbols Greek epsilon .
There are two prevailing definitions. In numerical analysis, machine epsilon is dependent on the type of rounding used and is also called unit roundoff, which has the symbol bold Roman u. However, by a less formal, but more widely used definition, machine epsilon is independent of rounding method and may be equivalent to u or 2u.
The following table lists machine epsilon values for standard floating-point formats. Each format uses round-to-nearest.
Rounding is a procedure for choosing the representation of a real number in a floating point number system. For a number system and a rounding procedure, machine epsilon is the maximum relative error of the chosen rounding procedure.
Some background is needed to determine a value from this definition. A floating point number system is characterized by a radix which is also called the base, , and by the precision , i.e. the number of radix digits of the significand (including any leading implicit bit). All the numbers with the same exponent, , have the spacing, . The spacing changes at the numbers that are perfect powers of ; the spacing on the side of larger magnitude is times larger than the spacing on the side of smaller magnitude.
Since machine epsilon is a bound for relative error, it suffices to consider numbers with exponent . It also suffices to consider positive numbers. For the usual round-to-nearest kind of rounding, the absolute rounding error is at most half the spacing, or . This value is the biggest possible numerator for the relative error. The denominator in the relative error is the number being rounded, which should be as small as possible to make the relative error large.
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