Author: martin fierz
Date: 16:04:34 05/03/04
Go up one level in this thread
On May 03, 2004 at 11:51:24, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote: >On May 03, 2004 at 11:04:59, Anthony Cozzie wrote: > >>As a physicist, you consider all numbers within an order of magnitude as equal >>;) > >Then you are not a physicist, but an engineer :) not at all - engineers care about exact numbers. else everything fails (e.g. all kinds of mars probes, ariane rockets, bridges, buildings and much much more, because exact numbers ARE important in engineering). >As a physicist, you care first and foremost about the error analysis of >the results (which immediately allows you to conclude whether they are >identical or not). that's not what physics is about. error analysis is important for sure, but never "first and foremost". >Ever seen any error margins in a computer chess paper? in fact yes - ernst heinz used to do stuff on statistical significance of some sort, IIRC it was whether you could conclude that one engine was stronger than another based on tournament results and rating computations. also, IIRC, his statistics were wrong :-) (IIRC he didn't seem to appreciate that if you have A+dA and B+dB, then the difference A-B does NOT have the error dA+dB). lots of IIRCs here, an old man's memory can easily be wrong... but in this context it would be interesting to know whether the number reported by bob (3.1) and those others floating around (3.0, 2.8) have any kind of error estimate. don't really understand who exactly floats those other numbers (vincent? you? both of you? anybody else?), don't really care. generally, if you give a number as %.1f educated people will assume that it has at least an error of +-0.1, making the numbers 3.1 and 3.0 compatible. and making the numbers 3.1 and 2.8 nearly compatible, if you think of 0.1 as one-sigma. it's you and bob who gave those numbers, it would be nice if you guys also gave an error estimate on those numbers, because if you are going to say 0.1, we can just drop the entire thread. oh wait, it was one of those vincent vs. bob "yes-you-did no-i-didn't" threads, so we could probably just drop it anyway :-) cheers martin
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