Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-year-1-of-the-computer-science-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2021/discrete-mathematics-continuous-mathematics-and-probability/4/a/solution
Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2021 Discrete mathematics, continuous mathematics, and probability 4 a Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
Use the standard spacing convention for machine epsilon: the next representable floating-point number above is . In a normalized binary representation this corresponds to significant binary digits, including the leading digit. The spacing throughout is therefore .
With rounding to nearest, the associated unit roundoff is half that spacing, ; for a normal result the relative round-off error is bounded by . Some texts instead call machine epsilon. Here denotes the spacing scale, and the iteration counts below use that convention. It describes representation precision, not a guarantee that an arbitrarily evaluated function has a relative error this small.
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