Choose the reciprocal-factorial summation eb for asymptotically high accuracy, counting multiplications and divisions as arithmetic work. For tolerance , linear powering in part (a)(i) takes multiplications; binary exponentiation in part (a)(ii) reduces this to . Part (c) also has arithmetic work, since its required grows like , though its constants and cancellation error differ.
By the reciprocal-factorial series remainder bound, the omitted positive tail satisfies
Thus the factorial denominator grows much faster than an exponential in the number of iterations. For decimal places, setting of order gives by Stirling's approximation, rather than binary-power arithmetic steps. This is a comparison in an exact-arithmetic operation-count model; the stated Big O notation does not determine the exact winner for every small tolerance. Taken literally, eb uses zero multiplications and only divisions. Fixed double-precision floating-point format cannot deliver arbitrarily many correct decimal places, and the precision-dependent cost of arbitrary-precision arithmetic is a separate issue.
Use the reciprocal-factorial sum for increasing accuracy. Let be the requested number of decimal places and use absolute error tolerance proportional to . Expanding gives and , so these are genuine first nonzero error orders. The first approximation needs of order . Even its fast implementation therefore uses multiplications, while the linear version uses exponentially many in . The third approximation needs of order , but its fast powering still uses multiplications, with two parallel accumulators and a cancellation-prone subtraction.
For the Taylor series sum, Stirling's formula gives , so a sufficient term count grows as . Its divisions therefore grow more slowly than the multiplication counts of either fast-power alternative. More concretely, its positive tail satisfies
The first omitted term also gives a lower bound . This is the reciprocal-factorial series remainder bound, supplying an explicit stopping certificate rather than relying only on Big O notation. It follows by bounding every successive tail denominator factor below by .
The sum also avoids subtraction of nearly equal large values and has small positive terms, making it numerically preferable. For a particular small accuracy request, constants and actual term counts may be compared directly; an asymptotic error bound alone does not prove a universal finite-input operation ranking. With ordinary Double, sufficiently many tiny positive terms stop changing the rounded sum, so beyond machine precision a higher-precision version is necessary regardless of the formula.
Figure 1.
Arithmetic work for eight decimal-accuracy targets, using high-precision reference errors rather than Double error estimates
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