Related
Why do some numbers lose accuracy when stored as floating point numbers?
For example, the decimal number 9.2 can be expressed exactly as a ratio of two decimal integers (92/10), both of which can be expressed exactly in binary (0b1011100/0b1010). However, the same ratio stored as a floating point number is never exactly equal to 9.2:
32-bit "single precision" float: 9.19999980926513671875
64-bit "double precision" float: 9.199999999999999289457264239899814128875732421875
How can such an apparently simple number be "too big" to express in 64 bits of memory?
In most programming languages, floating point numbers are represented a lot like scientific notation: with an exponent and a mantissa (also called the significand). A very simple number, say 9.2, is actually this fraction:
5179139571476070 * 2 -49
Where the exponent is -49 and the mantissa is 5179139571476070. The reason it is impossible to represent some decimal numbers this way is that both the exponent and the mantissa must be integers. In other words, all floats must be an integer multiplied by an integer power of 2.
9.2 may be simply 92/10, but 10 cannot be expressed as 2n if n is limited to integer values.
Seeing the Data
First, a few functions to see the components that make a 32- and 64-bit float. Gloss over these if you only care about the output (example in Python):
def float_to_bin_parts(number, bits=64):
if bits == 32: # single precision
int_pack = 'I'
float_pack = 'f'
exponent_bits = 8
mantissa_bits = 23
exponent_bias = 127
elif bits == 64: # double precision. all python floats are this
int_pack = 'Q'
float_pack = 'd'
exponent_bits = 11
mantissa_bits = 52
exponent_bias = 1023
else:
raise ValueError, 'bits argument must be 32 or 64'
bin_iter = iter(bin(struct.unpack(int_pack, struct.pack(float_pack, number))[0])[2:].rjust(bits, '0'))
return [''.join(islice(bin_iter, x)) for x in (1, exponent_bits, mantissa_bits)]
There's a lot of complexity behind that function, and it'd be quite the tangent to explain, but if you're interested, the important resource for our purposes is the struct module.
Python's float is a 64-bit, double-precision number. In other languages such as C, C++, Java and C#, double-precision has a separate type double, which is often implemented as 64 bits.
When we call that function with our example, 9.2, here's what we get:
>>> float_to_bin_parts(9.2)
['0', '10000000010', '0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110']
Interpreting the Data
You'll see I've split the return value into three components. These components are:
Sign
Exponent
Mantissa (also called Significand, or Fraction)
Sign
The sign is stored in the first component as a single bit. It's easy to explain: 0 means the float is a positive number; 1 means it's negative. Because 9.2 is positive, our sign value is 0.
Exponent
The exponent is stored in the middle component as 11 bits. In our case, 0b10000000010. In decimal, that represents the value 1026. A quirk of this component is that you must subtract a number equal to 2(# of bits) - 1 - 1 to get the true exponent; in our case, that means subtracting 0b1111111111 (decimal number 1023) to get the true exponent, 0b00000000011 (decimal number 3).
Mantissa
The mantissa is stored in the third component as 52 bits. However, there's a quirk to this component as well. To understand this quirk, consider a number in scientific notation, like this:
6.0221413x1023
The mantissa would be the 6.0221413. Recall that the mantissa in scientific notation always begins with a single non-zero digit. The same holds true for binary, except that binary only has two digits: 0 and 1. So the binary mantissa always starts with 1! When a float is stored, the 1 at the front of the binary mantissa is omitted to save space; we have to place it back at the front of our third element to get the true mantissa:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110
This involves more than just a simple addition, because the bits stored in our third component actually represent the fractional part of the mantissa, to the right of the radix point.
When dealing with decimal numbers, we "move the decimal point" by multiplying or dividing by powers of 10. In binary, we can do the same thing by multiplying or dividing by powers of 2. Since our third element has 52 bits, we divide it by 252 to move it 52 places to the right:
0.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110
In decimal notation, that's the same as dividing 675539944105574 by 4503599627370496 to get 0.1499999999999999. (This is one example of a ratio that can be expressed exactly in binary, but only approximately in decimal; for more detail, see: 675539944105574 / 4503599627370496.)
Now that we've transformed the third component into a fractional number, adding 1 gives the true mantissa.
Recapping the Components
Sign (first component): 0 for positive, 1 for negative
Exponent (middle component): Subtract 2(# of bits) - 1 - 1 to get the true exponent
Mantissa (last component): Divide by 2(# of bits) and add 1 to get the true mantissa
Calculating the Number
Putting all three parts together, we're given this binary number:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011
Which we can then convert from binary to decimal:
1.1499999999999999 x 23 (inexact!)
And multiply to reveal the final representation of the number we started with (9.2) after being stored as a floating point value:
9.1999999999999993
Representing as a Fraction
9.2
Now that we've built the number, it's possible to reconstruct it into a simple fraction:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011
Shift mantissa to a whole number:
10010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011-110100
Convert to decimal:
5179139571476070 x 23-52
Subtract the exponent:
5179139571476070 x 2-49
Turn negative exponent into division:
5179139571476070 / 249
Multiply exponent:
5179139571476070 / 562949953421312
Which equals:
9.1999999999999993
9.5
>>> float_to_bin_parts(9.5)
['0', '10000000010', '0011000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000']
Already you can see the mantissa is only 4 digits followed by a whole lot of zeroes. But let's go through the paces.
Assemble the binary scientific notation:
1.0011 x 1011
Shift the decimal point:
10011 x 1011-100
Subtract the exponent:
10011 x 10-1
Binary to decimal:
19 x 2-1
Negative exponent to division:
19 / 21
Multiply exponent:
19 / 2
Equals:
9.5
Further reading
The Floating-Point Guide: What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, or, Why don’t my numbers add up? (floating-point-gui.de)
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (Goldberg 1991)
IEEE Double-precision floating-point format (Wikipedia)
Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations (docs.python.org)
Floating Point Binary
This isn't a full answer (mhlester already covered a lot of good ground I won't duplicate), but I would like to stress how much the representation of a number depends on the base you are working in.
Consider the fraction 2/3
In good-ol' base 10, we typically write it out as something like
0.666...
0.666
0.667
When we look at those representations, we tend to associate each of them with the fraction 2/3, even though only the first representation is mathematically equal to the fraction. The second and third representations/approximations have an error on the order of 0.001, which is actually much worse than the error between 9.2 and 9.1999999999999993. In fact, the second representation isn't even rounded correctly! Nevertheless, we don't have a problem with 0.666 as an approximation of the number 2/3, so we shouldn't really have a problem with how 9.2 is approximated in most programs. (Yes, in some programs it matters.)
Number bases
So here's where number bases are crucial. If we were trying to represent 2/3 in base 3, then
(2/3)10 = 0.23
In other words, we have an exact, finite representation for the same number by switching bases! The take-away is that even though you can convert any number to any base, all rational numbers have exact finite representations in some bases but not in others.
To drive this point home, let's look at 1/2. It might surprise you that even though this perfectly simple number has an exact representation in base 10 and 2, it requires a repeating representation in base 3.
(1/2)10 = 0.510 = 0.12 = 0.1111...3
Why are floating point numbers inaccurate?
Because often-times, they are approximating rationals that cannot be represented finitely in base 2 (the digits repeat), and in general they are approximating real (possibly irrational) numbers which may not be representable in finitely many digits in any base.
While all of the other answers are good there is still one thing missing:
It is impossible to represent irrational numbers (e.g. π, sqrt(2), log(3), etc.) precisely!
And that actually is why they are called irrational. No amount of bit storage in the world would be enough to hold even one of them. Only symbolic arithmetic is able to preserve their precision.
Although if you would limit your math needs to rational numbers only the problem of precision becomes manageable. You would need to store a pair of (possibly very big) integers a and b to hold the number represented by the fraction a/b. All your arithmetic would have to be done on fractions just like in highschool math (e.g. a/b * c/d = ac/bd).
But of course you would still run into the same kind of trouble when pi, sqrt, log, sin, etc. are involved.
TL;DR
For hardware accelerated arithmetic only a limited amount of rational numbers can be represented. Every not-representable number is approximated. Some numbers (i.e. irrational) can never be represented no matter the system.
There are infinitely many real numbers (so many that you can't enumerate them), and there are infinitely many rational numbers (it is possible to enumerate them).
The floating-point representation is a finite one (like anything in a computer) so unavoidably many many many numbers are impossible to represent. In particular, 64 bits only allow you to distinguish among only 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values (which is nothing compared to infinity). With the standard convention, 9.2 is not one of them. Those that can are of the form m.2^e for some integers m and e.
You might come up with a different numeration system, 10 based for instance, where 9.2 would have an exact representation. But other numbers, say 1/3, would still be impossible to represent.
Also note that double-precision floating-points numbers are extremely accurate. They can represent any number in a very wide range with as much as 15 exact digits. For daily life computations, 4 or 5 digits are more than enough. You will never really need those 15, unless you want to count every millisecond of your lifetime.
Why can we not represent 9.2 in binary floating point?
Floating point numbers are (simplifying slightly) a positional numbering system with a restricted number of digits and a movable radix point.
A fraction can only be expressed exactly using a finite number of digits in a positional numbering system if the prime factors of the denominator (when the fraction is expressed in it's lowest terms) are factors of the base.
The prime factors of 10 are 5 and 2, so in base 10 we can represent any fraction of the form a/(2b5c).
On the other hand the only prime factor of 2 is 2, so in base 2 we can only represent fractions of the form a/(2b)
Why do computers use this representation?
Because it's a simple format to work with and it is sufficiently accurate for most purposes. Basically the same reason scientists use "scientific notation" and round their results to a reasonable number of digits at each step.
It would certainly be possible to define a fraction format, with (for example) a 32-bit numerator and a 32-bit denominator. It would be able to represent numbers that IEEE double precision floating point could not, but equally there would be many numbers that can be represented in double precision floating point that could not be represented in such a fixed-size fraction format.
However the big problem is that such a format is a pain to do calculations on. For two reasons.
If you want to have exactly one representation of each number then after each calculation you need to reduce the fraction to it's lowest terms. That means that for every operation you basically need to do a greatest common divisor calculation.
If after your calculation you end up with an unrepresentable result because the numerator or denominator you need to find the closest representable result. This is non-trivil.
Some Languages do offer fraction types, but usually they do it in combination with arbitary precision, this avoids needing to worry about approximating fractions but it creates it's own problem, when a number passes through a large number of calculation steps the size of the denominator and hence the storage needed for the fraction can explode.
Some languages also offer decimal floating point types, these are mainly used in scenarios where it is imporant that the results the computer gets match pre-existing rounding rules that were written with humans in mind (chiefly financial calculations). These are slightly more difficult to work with than binary floating point, but the biggest problem is that most computers don't offer hardware support for them.
Why do some numbers lose accuracy when stored as floating point numbers?
For example, the decimal number 9.2 can be expressed exactly as a ratio of two decimal integers (92/10), both of which can be expressed exactly in binary (0b1011100/0b1010). However, the same ratio stored as a floating point number is never exactly equal to 9.2:
32-bit "single precision" float: 9.19999980926513671875
64-bit "double precision" float: 9.199999999999999289457264239899814128875732421875
How can such an apparently simple number be "too big" to express in 64 bits of memory?
In most programming languages, floating point numbers are represented a lot like scientific notation: with an exponent and a mantissa (also called the significand). A very simple number, say 9.2, is actually this fraction:
5179139571476070 * 2 -49
Where the exponent is -49 and the mantissa is 5179139571476070. The reason it is impossible to represent some decimal numbers this way is that both the exponent and the mantissa must be integers. In other words, all floats must be an integer multiplied by an integer power of 2.
9.2 may be simply 92/10, but 10 cannot be expressed as 2n if n is limited to integer values.
Seeing the Data
First, a few functions to see the components that make a 32- and 64-bit float. Gloss over these if you only care about the output (example in Python):
def float_to_bin_parts(number, bits=64):
if bits == 32: # single precision
int_pack = 'I'
float_pack = 'f'
exponent_bits = 8
mantissa_bits = 23
exponent_bias = 127
elif bits == 64: # double precision. all python floats are this
int_pack = 'Q'
float_pack = 'd'
exponent_bits = 11
mantissa_bits = 52
exponent_bias = 1023
else:
raise ValueError, 'bits argument must be 32 or 64'
bin_iter = iter(bin(struct.unpack(int_pack, struct.pack(float_pack, number))[0])[2:].rjust(bits, '0'))
return [''.join(islice(bin_iter, x)) for x in (1, exponent_bits, mantissa_bits)]
There's a lot of complexity behind that function, and it'd be quite the tangent to explain, but if you're interested, the important resource for our purposes is the struct module.
Python's float is a 64-bit, double-precision number. In other languages such as C, C++, Java and C#, double-precision has a separate type double, which is often implemented as 64 bits.
When we call that function with our example, 9.2, here's what we get:
>>> float_to_bin_parts(9.2)
['0', '10000000010', '0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110']
Interpreting the Data
You'll see I've split the return value into three components. These components are:
Sign
Exponent
Mantissa (also called Significand, or Fraction)
Sign
The sign is stored in the first component as a single bit. It's easy to explain: 0 means the float is a positive number; 1 means it's negative. Because 9.2 is positive, our sign value is 0.
Exponent
The exponent is stored in the middle component as 11 bits. In our case, 0b10000000010. In decimal, that represents the value 1026. A quirk of this component is that you must subtract a number equal to 2(# of bits) - 1 - 1 to get the true exponent; in our case, that means subtracting 0b1111111111 (decimal number 1023) to get the true exponent, 0b00000000011 (decimal number 3).
Mantissa
The mantissa is stored in the third component as 52 bits. However, there's a quirk to this component as well. To understand this quirk, consider a number in scientific notation, like this:
6.0221413x1023
The mantissa would be the 6.0221413. Recall that the mantissa in scientific notation always begins with a single non-zero digit. The same holds true for binary, except that binary only has two digits: 0 and 1. So the binary mantissa always starts with 1! When a float is stored, the 1 at the front of the binary mantissa is omitted to save space; we have to place it back at the front of our third element to get the true mantissa:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110
This involves more than just a simple addition, because the bits stored in our third component actually represent the fractional part of the mantissa, to the right of the radix point.
When dealing with decimal numbers, we "move the decimal point" by multiplying or dividing by powers of 10. In binary, we can do the same thing by multiplying or dividing by powers of 2. Since our third element has 52 bits, we divide it by 252 to move it 52 places to the right:
0.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110
In decimal notation, that's the same as dividing 675539944105574 by 4503599627370496 to get 0.1499999999999999. (This is one example of a ratio that can be expressed exactly in binary, but only approximately in decimal; for more detail, see: 675539944105574 / 4503599627370496.)
Now that we've transformed the third component into a fractional number, adding 1 gives the true mantissa.
Recapping the Components
Sign (first component): 0 for positive, 1 for negative
Exponent (middle component): Subtract 2(# of bits) - 1 - 1 to get the true exponent
Mantissa (last component): Divide by 2(# of bits) and add 1 to get the true mantissa
Calculating the Number
Putting all three parts together, we're given this binary number:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011
Which we can then convert from binary to decimal:
1.1499999999999999 x 23 (inexact!)
And multiply to reveal the final representation of the number we started with (9.2) after being stored as a floating point value:
9.1999999999999993
Representing as a Fraction
9.2
Now that we've built the number, it's possible to reconstruct it into a simple fraction:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011
Shift mantissa to a whole number:
10010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011-110100
Convert to decimal:
5179139571476070 x 23-52
Subtract the exponent:
5179139571476070 x 2-49
Turn negative exponent into division:
5179139571476070 / 249
Multiply exponent:
5179139571476070 / 562949953421312
Which equals:
9.1999999999999993
9.5
>>> float_to_bin_parts(9.5)
['0', '10000000010', '0011000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000']
Already you can see the mantissa is only 4 digits followed by a whole lot of zeroes. But let's go through the paces.
Assemble the binary scientific notation:
1.0011 x 1011
Shift the decimal point:
10011 x 1011-100
Subtract the exponent:
10011 x 10-1
Binary to decimal:
19 x 2-1
Negative exponent to division:
19 / 21
Multiply exponent:
19 / 2
Equals:
9.5
Further reading
The Floating-Point Guide: What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, or, Why don’t my numbers add up? (floating-point-gui.de)
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (Goldberg 1991)
IEEE Double-precision floating-point format (Wikipedia)
Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations (docs.python.org)
Floating Point Binary
This isn't a full answer (mhlester already covered a lot of good ground I won't duplicate), but I would like to stress how much the representation of a number depends on the base you are working in.
Consider the fraction 2/3
In good-ol' base 10, we typically write it out as something like
0.666...
0.666
0.667
When we look at those representations, we tend to associate each of them with the fraction 2/3, even though only the first representation is mathematically equal to the fraction. The second and third representations/approximations have an error on the order of 0.001, which is actually much worse than the error between 9.2 and 9.1999999999999993. In fact, the second representation isn't even rounded correctly! Nevertheless, we don't have a problem with 0.666 as an approximation of the number 2/3, so we shouldn't really have a problem with how 9.2 is approximated in most programs. (Yes, in some programs it matters.)
Number bases
So here's where number bases are crucial. If we were trying to represent 2/3 in base 3, then
(2/3)10 = 0.23
In other words, we have an exact, finite representation for the same number by switching bases! The take-away is that even though you can convert any number to any base, all rational numbers have exact finite representations in some bases but not in others.
To drive this point home, let's look at 1/2. It might surprise you that even though this perfectly simple number has an exact representation in base 10 and 2, it requires a repeating representation in base 3.
(1/2)10 = 0.510 = 0.12 = 0.1111...3
Why are floating point numbers inaccurate?
Because often-times, they are approximating rationals that cannot be represented finitely in base 2 (the digits repeat), and in general they are approximating real (possibly irrational) numbers which may not be representable in finitely many digits in any base.
While all of the other answers are good there is still one thing missing:
It is impossible to represent irrational numbers (e.g. π, sqrt(2), log(3), etc.) precisely!
And that actually is why they are called irrational. No amount of bit storage in the world would be enough to hold even one of them. Only symbolic arithmetic is able to preserve their precision.
Although if you would limit your math needs to rational numbers only the problem of precision becomes manageable. You would need to store a pair of (possibly very big) integers a and b to hold the number represented by the fraction a/b. All your arithmetic would have to be done on fractions just like in highschool math (e.g. a/b * c/d = ac/bd).
But of course you would still run into the same kind of trouble when pi, sqrt, log, sin, etc. are involved.
TL;DR
For hardware accelerated arithmetic only a limited amount of rational numbers can be represented. Every not-representable number is approximated. Some numbers (i.e. irrational) can never be represented no matter the system.
There are infinitely many real numbers (so many that you can't enumerate them), and there are infinitely many rational numbers (it is possible to enumerate them).
The floating-point representation is a finite one (like anything in a computer) so unavoidably many many many numbers are impossible to represent. In particular, 64 bits only allow you to distinguish among only 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values (which is nothing compared to infinity). With the standard convention, 9.2 is not one of them. Those that can are of the form m.2^e for some integers m and e.
You might come up with a different numeration system, 10 based for instance, where 9.2 would have an exact representation. But other numbers, say 1/3, would still be impossible to represent.
Also note that double-precision floating-points numbers are extremely accurate. They can represent any number in a very wide range with as much as 15 exact digits. For daily life computations, 4 or 5 digits are more than enough. You will never really need those 15, unless you want to count every millisecond of your lifetime.
Why can we not represent 9.2 in binary floating point?
Floating point numbers are (simplifying slightly) a positional numbering system with a restricted number of digits and a movable radix point.
A fraction can only be expressed exactly using a finite number of digits in a positional numbering system if the prime factors of the denominator (when the fraction is expressed in it's lowest terms) are factors of the base.
The prime factors of 10 are 5 and 2, so in base 10 we can represent any fraction of the form a/(2b5c).
On the other hand the only prime factor of 2 is 2, so in base 2 we can only represent fractions of the form a/(2b)
Why do computers use this representation?
Because it's a simple format to work with and it is sufficiently accurate for most purposes. Basically the same reason scientists use "scientific notation" and round their results to a reasonable number of digits at each step.
It would certainly be possible to define a fraction format, with (for example) a 32-bit numerator and a 32-bit denominator. It would be able to represent numbers that IEEE double precision floating point could not, but equally there would be many numbers that can be represented in double precision floating point that could not be represented in such a fixed-size fraction format.
However the big problem is that such a format is a pain to do calculations on. For two reasons.
If you want to have exactly one representation of each number then after each calculation you need to reduce the fraction to it's lowest terms. That means that for every operation you basically need to do a greatest common divisor calculation.
If after your calculation you end up with an unrepresentable result because the numerator or denominator you need to find the closest representable result. This is non-trivil.
Some Languages do offer fraction types, but usually they do it in combination with arbitary precision, this avoids needing to worry about approximating fractions but it creates it's own problem, when a number passes through a large number of calculation steps the size of the denominator and hence the storage needed for the fraction can explode.
Some languages also offer decimal floating point types, these are mainly used in scenarios where it is imporant that the results the computer gets match pre-existing rounding rules that were written with humans in mind (chiefly financial calculations). These are slightly more difficult to work with than binary floating point, but the biggest problem is that most computers don't offer hardware support for them.
I am writing tests for code performing calculations on floating point numbers. Quite expectedly, the results are rarely exact and I would like to set a tolerance between the calculated and expected result. I have verified that in practice, with double precision, the results are always correct after rounding of last two significant decimals, but usually after rounding the last decimal. I am aware of the format in which doubles and floats are stored, as well as the two main methods of rounding (precise via BigDecimal and faster via multiplication, math.round and division). As the mantissa is stored in binary however, is there a way to perform rounding using base 2 rather than 10?
Just clearing the last 3 bits almost always yields equal results, but if I could push it and instead 'add 2' to the mantissa if its second least significast bit is set, I could probably reach the limit of accuracy. This would be easy enough, expect I have no idea how to handle overflow (when all bits 52-1 are set).
A Java solution would be preferred, but I could probably port one for another language if I understood it.
EDIT:
As part of the problem was that my code was generic with regards to arithmetic (relying on scala.Numeric type class), what I did was an incorporation of rounding suggested in the answer into a new numeric type, which carried the calculated number (floating point in this case) and rounding error, essentially representing a range instead of a point. I then overrode equals so that two numbers are equal if their error ranges overlap (and they share arithmetic, i.e. the number type).
Yes, rounding off binary digits makes more sense than going through BigDecimal and can be implemented very efficiently if you are not worried about being within a small factor of Double.MAX_VALUE.
You can round a floating-point double value x with the following sequence in Java (untested):
double t = 9 * x; // beware: this overflows if x is too close to Double.MAX_VALUE
double y = x - t + t;
After this sequence, y should contain the rounded value. Adjust the distance between the two set bits in the constant 9 in order to adjust the number of bits that are rounded off. The value 3 rounds off one bit. The value 5 rounds off two bits. The value 17 rounds off four bits, and so on.
This sequence of instruction is attributed to Veltkamp and is typically used in “Dekker multiplication”. This page has some references.
Why do some numbers lose accuracy when stored as floating point numbers?
For example, the decimal number 9.2 can be expressed exactly as a ratio of two decimal integers (92/10), both of which can be expressed exactly in binary (0b1011100/0b1010). However, the same ratio stored as a floating point number is never exactly equal to 9.2:
32-bit "single precision" float: 9.19999980926513671875
64-bit "double precision" float: 9.199999999999999289457264239899814128875732421875
How can such an apparently simple number be "too big" to express in 64 bits of memory?
In most programming languages, floating point numbers are represented a lot like scientific notation: with an exponent and a mantissa (also called the significand). A very simple number, say 9.2, is actually this fraction:
5179139571476070 * 2 -49
Where the exponent is -49 and the mantissa is 5179139571476070. The reason it is impossible to represent some decimal numbers this way is that both the exponent and the mantissa must be integers. In other words, all floats must be an integer multiplied by an integer power of 2.
9.2 may be simply 92/10, but 10 cannot be expressed as 2n if n is limited to integer values.
Seeing the Data
First, a few functions to see the components that make a 32- and 64-bit float. Gloss over these if you only care about the output (example in Python):
def float_to_bin_parts(number, bits=64):
if bits == 32: # single precision
int_pack = 'I'
float_pack = 'f'
exponent_bits = 8
mantissa_bits = 23
exponent_bias = 127
elif bits == 64: # double precision. all python floats are this
int_pack = 'Q'
float_pack = 'd'
exponent_bits = 11
mantissa_bits = 52
exponent_bias = 1023
else:
raise ValueError, 'bits argument must be 32 or 64'
bin_iter = iter(bin(struct.unpack(int_pack, struct.pack(float_pack, number))[0])[2:].rjust(bits, '0'))
return [''.join(islice(bin_iter, x)) for x in (1, exponent_bits, mantissa_bits)]
There's a lot of complexity behind that function, and it'd be quite the tangent to explain, but if you're interested, the important resource for our purposes is the struct module.
Python's float is a 64-bit, double-precision number. In other languages such as C, C++, Java and C#, double-precision has a separate type double, which is often implemented as 64 bits.
When we call that function with our example, 9.2, here's what we get:
>>> float_to_bin_parts(9.2)
['0', '10000000010', '0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110']
Interpreting the Data
You'll see I've split the return value into three components. These components are:
Sign
Exponent
Mantissa (also called Significand, or Fraction)
Sign
The sign is stored in the first component as a single bit. It's easy to explain: 0 means the float is a positive number; 1 means it's negative. Because 9.2 is positive, our sign value is 0.
Exponent
The exponent is stored in the middle component as 11 bits. In our case, 0b10000000010. In decimal, that represents the value 1026. A quirk of this component is that you must subtract a number equal to 2(# of bits) - 1 - 1 to get the true exponent; in our case, that means subtracting 0b1111111111 (decimal number 1023) to get the true exponent, 0b00000000011 (decimal number 3).
Mantissa
The mantissa is stored in the third component as 52 bits. However, there's a quirk to this component as well. To understand this quirk, consider a number in scientific notation, like this:
6.0221413x1023
The mantissa would be the 6.0221413. Recall that the mantissa in scientific notation always begins with a single non-zero digit. The same holds true for binary, except that binary only has two digits: 0 and 1. So the binary mantissa always starts with 1! When a float is stored, the 1 at the front of the binary mantissa is omitted to save space; we have to place it back at the front of our third element to get the true mantissa:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110
This involves more than just a simple addition, because the bits stored in our third component actually represent the fractional part of the mantissa, to the right of the radix point.
When dealing with decimal numbers, we "move the decimal point" by multiplying or dividing by powers of 10. In binary, we can do the same thing by multiplying or dividing by powers of 2. Since our third element has 52 bits, we divide it by 252 to move it 52 places to the right:
0.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110
In decimal notation, that's the same as dividing 675539944105574 by 4503599627370496 to get 0.1499999999999999. (This is one example of a ratio that can be expressed exactly in binary, but only approximately in decimal; for more detail, see: 675539944105574 / 4503599627370496.)
Now that we've transformed the third component into a fractional number, adding 1 gives the true mantissa.
Recapping the Components
Sign (first component): 0 for positive, 1 for negative
Exponent (middle component): Subtract 2(# of bits) - 1 - 1 to get the true exponent
Mantissa (last component): Divide by 2(# of bits) and add 1 to get the true mantissa
Calculating the Number
Putting all three parts together, we're given this binary number:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011
Which we can then convert from binary to decimal:
1.1499999999999999 x 23 (inexact!)
And multiply to reveal the final representation of the number we started with (9.2) after being stored as a floating point value:
9.1999999999999993
Representing as a Fraction
9.2
Now that we've built the number, it's possible to reconstruct it into a simple fraction:
1.0010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011
Shift mantissa to a whole number:
10010011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110 x 1011-110100
Convert to decimal:
5179139571476070 x 23-52
Subtract the exponent:
5179139571476070 x 2-49
Turn negative exponent into division:
5179139571476070 / 249
Multiply exponent:
5179139571476070 / 562949953421312
Which equals:
9.1999999999999993
9.5
>>> float_to_bin_parts(9.5)
['0', '10000000010', '0011000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000']
Already you can see the mantissa is only 4 digits followed by a whole lot of zeroes. But let's go through the paces.
Assemble the binary scientific notation:
1.0011 x 1011
Shift the decimal point:
10011 x 1011-100
Subtract the exponent:
10011 x 10-1
Binary to decimal:
19 x 2-1
Negative exponent to division:
19 / 21
Multiply exponent:
19 / 2
Equals:
9.5
Further reading
The Floating-Point Guide: What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, or, Why don’t my numbers add up? (floating-point-gui.de)
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (Goldberg 1991)
IEEE Double-precision floating-point format (Wikipedia)
Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations (docs.python.org)
Floating Point Binary
This isn't a full answer (mhlester already covered a lot of good ground I won't duplicate), but I would like to stress how much the representation of a number depends on the base you are working in.
Consider the fraction 2/3
In good-ol' base 10, we typically write it out as something like
0.666...
0.666
0.667
When we look at those representations, we tend to associate each of them with the fraction 2/3, even though only the first representation is mathematically equal to the fraction. The second and third representations/approximations have an error on the order of 0.001, which is actually much worse than the error between 9.2 and 9.1999999999999993. In fact, the second representation isn't even rounded correctly! Nevertheless, we don't have a problem with 0.666 as an approximation of the number 2/3, so we shouldn't really have a problem with how 9.2 is approximated in most programs. (Yes, in some programs it matters.)
Number bases
So here's where number bases are crucial. If we were trying to represent 2/3 in base 3, then
(2/3)10 = 0.23
In other words, we have an exact, finite representation for the same number by switching bases! The take-away is that even though you can convert any number to any base, all rational numbers have exact finite representations in some bases but not in others.
To drive this point home, let's look at 1/2. It might surprise you that even though this perfectly simple number has an exact representation in base 10 and 2, it requires a repeating representation in base 3.
(1/2)10 = 0.510 = 0.12 = 0.1111...3
Why are floating point numbers inaccurate?
Because often-times, they are approximating rationals that cannot be represented finitely in base 2 (the digits repeat), and in general they are approximating real (possibly irrational) numbers which may not be representable in finitely many digits in any base.
While all of the other answers are good there is still one thing missing:
It is impossible to represent irrational numbers (e.g. π, sqrt(2), log(3), etc.) precisely!
And that actually is why they are called irrational. No amount of bit storage in the world would be enough to hold even one of them. Only symbolic arithmetic is able to preserve their precision.
Although if you would limit your math needs to rational numbers only the problem of precision becomes manageable. You would need to store a pair of (possibly very big) integers a and b to hold the number represented by the fraction a/b. All your arithmetic would have to be done on fractions just like in highschool math (e.g. a/b * c/d = ac/bd).
But of course you would still run into the same kind of trouble when pi, sqrt, log, sin, etc. are involved.
TL;DR
For hardware accelerated arithmetic only a limited amount of rational numbers can be represented. Every not-representable number is approximated. Some numbers (i.e. irrational) can never be represented no matter the system.
There are infinitely many real numbers (so many that you can't enumerate them), and there are infinitely many rational numbers (it is possible to enumerate them).
The floating-point representation is a finite one (like anything in a computer) so unavoidably many many many numbers are impossible to represent. In particular, 64 bits only allow you to distinguish among only 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values (which is nothing compared to infinity). With the standard convention, 9.2 is not one of them. Those that can are of the form m.2^e for some integers m and e.
You might come up with a different numeration system, 10 based for instance, where 9.2 would have an exact representation. But other numbers, say 1/3, would still be impossible to represent.
Also note that double-precision floating-points numbers are extremely accurate. They can represent any number in a very wide range with as much as 15 exact digits. For daily life computations, 4 or 5 digits are more than enough. You will never really need those 15, unless you want to count every millisecond of your lifetime.
Why can we not represent 9.2 in binary floating point?
Floating point numbers are (simplifying slightly) a positional numbering system with a restricted number of digits and a movable radix point.
A fraction can only be expressed exactly using a finite number of digits in a positional numbering system if the prime factors of the denominator (when the fraction is expressed in it's lowest terms) are factors of the base.
The prime factors of 10 are 5 and 2, so in base 10 we can represent any fraction of the form a/(2b5c).
On the other hand the only prime factor of 2 is 2, so in base 2 we can only represent fractions of the form a/(2b)
Why do computers use this representation?
Because it's a simple format to work with and it is sufficiently accurate for most purposes. Basically the same reason scientists use "scientific notation" and round their results to a reasonable number of digits at each step.
It would certainly be possible to define a fraction format, with (for example) a 32-bit numerator and a 32-bit denominator. It would be able to represent numbers that IEEE double precision floating point could not, but equally there would be many numbers that can be represented in double precision floating point that could not be represented in such a fixed-size fraction format.
However the big problem is that such a format is a pain to do calculations on. For two reasons.
If you want to have exactly one representation of each number then after each calculation you need to reduce the fraction to it's lowest terms. That means that for every operation you basically need to do a greatest common divisor calculation.
If after your calculation you end up with an unrepresentable result because the numerator or denominator you need to find the closest representable result. This is non-trivil.
Some Languages do offer fraction types, but usually they do it in combination with arbitary precision, this avoids needing to worry about approximating fractions but it creates it's own problem, when a number passes through a large number of calculation steps the size of the denominator and hence the storage needed for the fraction can explode.
Some languages also offer decimal floating point types, these are mainly used in scenarios where it is imporant that the results the computer gets match pre-existing rounding rules that were written with humans in mind (chiefly financial calculations). These are slightly more difficult to work with than binary floating point, but the biggest problem is that most computers don't offer hardware support for them.
This question already has answers here:
How to avoid floating point precision errors with floats or doubles in Java?
(12 answers)
Double calculation producing odd result [duplicate]
(3 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
This is partly academic, as for my purposes I only need it rounded to two decimal places; but I am keen to know what is going on to produce two slightly different results.
This is the test that I wrote to narrow it to the simplest implementation:
#Test
public void shouldEqual() {
double expected = 450.00d / (7d * 60); // 1.0714285714285714
double actual = 450.00d / 7d / 60; // 1.0714285714285716
assertThat(actual).isEqualTo(expected);
}
But it fails with this output:
org.junit.ComparisonFailure:
Expected :1.0714285714285714
Actual :1.0714285714285716
Can anyone explain in detail what is going on under the hood to result in the value at 1.000000000000000X being different?
Some of the points I'm looking for in an answer are:
Where is the precision lost?
Which method is preferred, and why?
Which is actually correct? (In pure maths, both can't be right. Perhaps both are wrong?)
Is there a better solution or method for these arithmetic operations?
I see a bunch of questions that tell you how to work around this problem, but not one that really explains what's going on, other than "floating-point roundoff error is bad, m'kay?" So let me take a shot at it. Let me first point out that nothing in this answer is specific to Java. Roundoff error is a problem inherent to any fixed-precision representation of numbers, so you get the same issues in, say, C.
Roundoff error in a decimal data type
As a simplified example, imagine we have some sort of computer that natively uses an unsigned decimal data type, let's call it float6d. The length of the data type is 6 digits: 4 dedicated to the mantissa, and 2 dedicated to the exponent. For example, the number 3.142 can be expressed as
3.142 x 10^0
which would be stored in 6 digits as
503142
The first two digits are the exponent plus 50, and the last four are the mantissa. This data type can represent any number from 0.001 x 10^-50 to 9.999 x 10^+49.
Actually, that's not true. It can't store any number. What if you want to represent 3.141592? Or 3.1412034? Or 3.141488906? Tough luck, the data type can't store more than four digits of precision, so the compiler has to round anything with more digits to fit into the constraints of the data type. If you write
float6d x = 3.141592;
float6d y = 3.1412034;
float6d z = 3.141488906;
then the compiler converts each of these three values to the same internal representation, 3.142 x 10^0 (which, remember, is stored as 503142), so that x == y == z will hold true.
The point is that there is a whole range of real numbers which all map to the same underlying sequence of digits (or bits, in a real computer). Specifically, any x satisfying 3.1415 <= x <= 3.1425 (assuming half-even rounding) gets converted to the representation 503142 for storage in memory.
This rounding happens every time your program stores a floating-point value in memory. The first time it happens is when you write a constant in your source code, as I did above with x, y, and z. It happens again whenever you do an arithmetic operation that increases the number of digits of precision beyond what the data type can represent. Either of these effects is called roundoff error. There are a few different ways this can happen:
Addition and subtraction: if one of the values you're adding has a different exponent from the other, you will wind up with extra digits of precision, and if there are enough of them, the least significant ones will need to be dropped. For example, 2.718 and 121.0 are both values that can be exactly represented in the float6d data type. But if you try to add them together:
1.210 x 10^2
+ 0.02718 x 10^2
-------------------
1.23718 x 10^2
which gets rounded off to 1.237 x 10^2, or 123.7, dropping two digits of precision.
Multiplication: the number of digits in the result is approximately the sum of the number of digits in the two operands. This will produce some amount of roundoff error, if your operands already have many significant digits. For example, 121 x 2.718 gives you
1.210 x 10^2
x 0.02718 x 10^2
-------------------
3.28878 x 10^2
which gets rounded off to 3.289 x 10^2, or 328.9, again dropping two digits of precision.
However, it's useful to keep in mind that, if your operands are "nice" numbers, without many significant digits, the floating-point format can probably represent the result exactly, so you don't have to deal with roundoff error. For example, 2.3 x 140 gives
1.40 x 10^2
x 0.23 x 10^2
-------------------
3.22 x 10^2
which has no roundoff problems.
Division: this is where things get messy. Division will pretty much always result in some amount of roundoff error unless the number you're dividing by happens to be a power of the base (in which case the division is just a digit shift, or bit shift in binary). As an example, take two very simple numbers, 3 and 7, divide them, and you get
3. x 10^0
/ 7. x 10^0
----------------------------
0.428571428571... x 10^0
The closest value to this number which can be represented as a float6d is 4.286 x 10^-1, or 0.4286, which distinctly differs from the exact result.
As we'll see in the next section, the error introduced by rounding grows with each operation you do. So if you're working with "nice" numbers, as in your example, it's generally best to do the division operations as late as possible because those are the operations most likely to introduce roundoff error into your program where none existed before.
Analysis of roundoff error
In general, if you can't assume your numbers are "nice", roundoff error can be either positive or negative, and it's very difficult to predict which direction it will go just based on the operation. It depends on the specific values involved. Look at this plot of the roundoff error for 2.718 z as a function of z (still using the float6d data type):
In practice, when you're working with values that use the full precision of your data type, it's often easier to treat roundoff error as a random error. Looking at the plot, you might be able to guess that the magnitude of the error depends on the order of magnitude of the result of the operation. In this particular case, when z is of the order 10-1, 2.718 z is also on the order of 10-1, so it will be a number of the form 0.XXXX. The maximum roundoff error is then half of the last digit of precision; in this case, by "the last digit of precision" I mean 0.0001, so the roundoff error varies between -0.00005 and +0.00005. At the point where 2.718 z jumps up to the next order of magnitude, which is 1/2.718 = 0.3679, you can see that the roundoff error also jumps up by an order of magnitude.
You can use well-known techniques of error analysis to analyze how a random (or unpredictable) error of a certain magnitude affects your result. Specifically, for multiplication or division, the "average" relative error in your result can be approximated by adding the relative error in each of the operands in quadrature - that is, square them, add them, and take the square root. With our float6d data type, the relative error varies between 0.0005 (for a value like 0.101) and 0.00005 (for a value like 0.995).
Let's take 0.0001 as a rough average for the relative error in values x and y. The relative error in x * y or x / y is then given by
sqrt(0.0001^2 + 0.0001^2) = 0.0001414
which is a factor of sqrt(2) larger than the relative error in each of the individual values.
When it comes to combining operations, you can apply this formula multiple times, once for each floating-point operation. So for instance, for z / (x * y), the relative error in x * y is, on average, 0.0001414 (in this decimal example) and then the relative error in z / (x * y) is
sqrt(0.0001^2 + 0.0001414^2) = 0.0001732
Notice that the average relative error grows with each operation, specifically as the square root of the number of multiplications and divisions you do.
Similarly, for z / x * y, the average relative error in z / x is 0.0001414, and the relative error in z / x * y is
sqrt(0.0001414^2 + 0.0001^2) = 0.0001732
So, the same, in this case. This means that for arbitrary values, on average, the two expressions introduce approximately the same error. (In theory, that is. I've seen these operations behave very differently in practice, but that's another story.)
Gory details
You might be curious about the specific calculation you presented in the question, not just an average. For that analysis, let's switch to the real world of binary arithmetic. Floating-point numbers in most systems and languages are represented using IEEE standard 754. For 64-bit numbers, the format specifies 52 bits dedicated to the mantissa, 11 to the exponent, and one to the sign. In other words, when written in base 2, a floating point number is a value of the form
1.1100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 x 2^00000000010
52 bits 11 bits
The leading 1 is not explicitly stored, and constitutes a 53rd bit. Also, you should note that the 11 bits stored to represent the exponent are actually the real exponent plus 1023. For example, this particular value is 7, which is 1.75 x 22. The mantissa is 1.75 in binary, or 1.11, and the exponent is 1023 + 2 = 1025 in binary, or 10000000001, so the content stored in memory is
01000000000111100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
^ ^
exponent mantissa
but that doesn't really matter.
Your example also involves 450,
1.1100001000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 x 2^00000001000
and 60,
1.1110000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 x 2^00000000101
You can play around with these values using this converter or any of many others on the internet.
When you compute the first expression, 450/(7*60), the processor first does the multiplication, obtaining 420, or
1.1010010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 x 2^00000001000
Then it divides 450 by 420. This produces 15/14, which is
1.0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001...
in binary. Now, the Java language specification says that
Inexact results must be rounded to the representable value nearest to the infinitely precise result; if the two nearest representable values are equally near, the one with its least significant bit zero is chosen. This is the IEEE 754 standard's default rounding mode known as round to nearest.
and the nearest representable value to 15/14 in 64-bit IEEE 754 format is
1.0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001 x 2^00000000000
which is approximately 1.0714285714285714 in decimal. (More precisely, this is the least precise decimal value that uniquely specifies this particular binary representation.)
On the other hand, if you compute 450 / 7 first, the result is 64.2857142857..., or in binary,
1000000.01001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001...
for which the nearest representable value is
1.0000000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100101 x 2^00000000110
which is 64.28571428571429180465... Note the change in the last digit of the binary mantissa (compared to the exact value) due to roundoff error. Dividing this by 60 gives you
1.000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100110011001100110011...
Look at the end: the pattern is different! It's 0011 that repeats, instead of 001 as in the other case. The closest representable value is
1.0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001010 x 2^00000000000
which differs from the other order of operations in the last two bits: they're 10 instead of 01. The decimal equivalent is 1.0714285714285716.
The specific rounding that causes this difference should be clear if you look at the exact binary values:
1.0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001...
1.0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001100110011001100110...
^ last bit of mantissa
It works out in this case that the former result, numerically 15/14, happens to be the most accurate representation of the exact value. This is an example of how leaving division until the end benefits you. But again, this rule only holds as long as the values you're working with don't use the full precision of the data type. Once you start working with inexact (rounded) values, you no longer protect yourself from further roundoff errors by doing the multiplications first.
It has to do with how the double type is implemented and the fact that the floating-point types don't make the same precision guarantees as other simpler numerical types. Although the following answer is more specifically about sums, it also answers your question by explaining how there is no guarantee of infinite precision in floating-point mathematical operations: Why does changing the sum order returns a different result?. Essentially you should never attempt to determine the equality of floating-point values without specifying an acceptable margin of error. Google's Guava library includes DoubleMath.fuzzyEquals(double, double, double) to determine the equality of two double values within a certain precision. If you wish to read up on the specifics of floating-point equality this site is quite useful; the same site also explains floating-point rounding errors. In summation: the expected and actual values of your calculation differ because of the rounding differing between the calculations due to the order of operations.
Let's simplify things a bit. What you want to know is why 450d / 420 and 450d / 7 / 60 (specifically) give different results.
Let's see how division is performed in IEE double-precision floating point format. Without going deep into implementation details, it's basically XOR-ing the sign bit, subtracting the exponent of the divisor from the exponent of the dividend, dividing the mantissas, and normalizing the result.
First, we should represent our numbers in the proper format for double:
450 is 0 10000000111 1100001000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
420 is 0 10000000111 1010010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
7 is 0 10000000001 1100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
60 is 0 10000000100 1110000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Let's first divide 450 by 420
First comes the sign bit, it's 0 (0 xor 0 == 0).
Then comes the exponent. 10000000111b - 10000000111b + 1023 == 10000000111b - 10000000111b + 01111111111b == 01111111111b
Looking good, now the mantissa:
1.1100001000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 / 1.1010010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 == 1.1100001 / 1.101001. There are a couple of different ways to do this, I'll talk a bit about them later. The result is 1.0(001) (you can verify it here).
Now we should normalize the result. Let's see the guard, round and sticky bit values:
0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001 0 0 1
Guard bit's 0, we don't do any rounding. The result is, in binary:
0 01111111111 0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001
Which gets represented as 1.0714285714285714 in decimal.
Now let's divide 450 by 7 by analogy.
Sign bit = 0
Exponent = 10000000111b - 10000000001b + 01111111111b == -01111111001b + 01111111111b + 01111111111b == 10000000101b
Mantissa = 1.1100001 / 1.11 == 1.00000(001)
Rounding:
0000000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100 1 0 0
Guard bit is set, round and sticky bits are not. We are rounding to-nearest (default mode for IEEE), and we're stuck right between the two possible values which we could round to. As the lsb is 0, we add 1. This gives us the rounded mantissa:
0000000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100101
The result is
0 10000000101 0000000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100101
Which gets represented as 64.28571428571429 in decimal.
Now we will have to divide it by 60... But you already know that we have lost some precision. Dividing 450 by 420 didn't require rounding at all, but here, we already had to round the result at least once. But, for completeness's sake, let's finish the job:
Dividing 64.28571428571429 by 60
Sign bit = 0
Exponent = 10000000101b - 10000000100b + 01111111111b == 01111111110b
Mantissa = 1.0000000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100101 / 1.111 == 0.10001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001100110011
Round and shift:
0.1000100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100 1 1 0 0
1.0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001 1 0 0
Rounding just as in the previous case, we get the mantissa: 0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001010.
As we shifted by 1, we add that to the exponent, getting
Exponent = 01111111111b
So, the result is:
0 01111111111 0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001010
Which gets represented as 1.0714285714285716 in decimal.
Tl;dr:
The first division gave us:
0 01111111111 0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001
And the last division gave us:
0 01111111111 0001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001010
The difference is in the last 2 bits only, but we could have lost more - after all, to get the second result, we had to round two times instead of none!
Now, about mantissa division. Floating-point division is implemented in two major ways.
The way mandated by the IEEE long division (here are some good examples; it's basically the regular long division, but with binary instead of decimal), and it's pretty slow. That is what your computer did.
There is also a faster but less accrate option, multiplication by inverse. First, a reciprocal of the divisor is found, and then multiplication is performed.
That's because double division often lead to a loss of precision. Said loss can vary depending on the order of the divisions.
When you divide by 7d, you already lost some precision with the actual result. Then only you divide an erroneous result by 60.
When you divide by 7d * 60, you only have to use division once, thus losing precision only once.
Note that double multiplication can sometimes fail too, but that's much less common.
Certainly the order of the operations mixed with the fact that doubles aren't precise :
450.00d / (7d * 60) --> a = 7d * 60 --> result = 450.00d / a
vs
450.00d / 7d / 60 --> a = 450.00d /7d --> result = a / 60