Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsalaj | Hacker News Reader

Google calculator gives answer 0 where as duckduckgo calculator answers with 2. xD

That's disappointing. The Android calculator has an awesome arbitrary precision engine (implemented by Hans Boehm!).

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/8/219594-small-data-comp...

Interesting thing is that Google calculator will give 2 if you fill in the numbers by clicking on the calculator buttons, instead of writing them in the search bar.

Bing gives 1 though!

So duckduckgo uses the normal 64bit floating point, and the clever people at bing automatically switch to bignums when needed. But I have no idea what google does to get that 0?

I think Google is truncating the numbers. You get 0 even if you do:

9999999999999999 – 9999999999999990

    9999999999999999 - 9999999999999971 ==  0
    9999999999999999 - 9999999999999970 == 30
    9999999999999999 - 9999999999999969 == 32
    9999999999999999 - 9999999999999966 == 34

Reply on news.ycombinator.com