## Floating point addition is not associative

February 28th, 2014 | Categories: general math, matlab, Numerics, programming, python | Tags:

A lot of people don’t seem to know this….and they should. When working with floating point arithmetic, it is not necessarily true that a+(b+c) = (a+b)+c. Here is a demo using MATLAB

>> x=0.1+(0.2+0.3);
>> y=(0.1+0.2)+0.3;
>> % are they equal?
>> x==y

ans =
0

>> % lets look
>> sprintf('%.17f',x)
ans =
0.59999999999999998

>> sprintf('%.17f',y)
ans =
0.60000000000000009

These results have nothing to do with the fact that I am using MATLAB. Here’s the same thing in Python

>>> x=(0.1+0.2)+0.3
>>> y=0.1+(0.2+0.3)
>>> x==y
False
>>> print('%.17f' %x)
0.60000000000000009
>>> print('%.17f' %y)
0.59999999999999998

If this upsets you, or if you don’t understand why, I suggest you read the following

Does anyone else out there have suggestions for similar resources on this topic?

1. Lahey hosts a nice concise 1996 essay by Bruce M. Bush, “The Perils of Floating Point”:
http://www.lahey.com/float.htm

The examples are in Fortran but every real programmer knows Fortran anyway, right? :)

And for a historical perspective there’s this 1998 interview with William Kahan on the advent of IEEE standardization:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html

The takeaway here is, if you think FP is bad today it was much worse before!

2. A similar resource, with the same numbers:

3. Associative? It’s not even Commutative:

octave:1> x=0.1+0.2+0.3
x = 0.60000
octave:2> y=0.3+0.2+0.1
y = 0.60000
octave:3> x==y
ans = 0
octave:4> x-y
ans = 1.1102e-16

4. Nice resources…thanks all :)

5. A recent blog post about algorithm issues related to floating points: Bisecting Floating Point Numbers.

6. Knuth has a extensive discussion of this (and practically everything else) in AOCP.

7. Book references for floating point arithmetic include

Chapter 2 of
Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms (SIAM, 2nd ed, 2002)
http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/asna/index.php

Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic (SIAM, 2001)
http://www.ec-securehost.com/SIAM/ot76.html

and

Handbook of Floating-Point Arithmetic (Birkhauser, 2010)
http://www.springer.com/birkhauser/mathematics/book/978-0-8176-4704-9

able to access these books in PDF form.

8. I may also add that writings by Bruce Dawson are excellent:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/category/floating-point/

For instance, I found these particularly insightful and informative:
– Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/comparing-floating-point-numbers-2012-edition/
– Floating-Point Determinism: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/floating-point-determinism/
– Floating-point complexities: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/floating-point-complexities/
– Intermediate Floating-Point Precision: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/intermediate-floating-point-precision/
– Float Precision–From Zero to 100+ Digits: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/float-precisionfrom-zero-to-100-digits-2/

9. Mathematica doesn’t seem to have any problems:

In[1]:= x = 0.1 + (0.2 + 0.3);
y = (0.1 + 0.2) + 0.3;

In[3]:= x == y

Out[3]= True

10. @Ruben I disagree! Let’s look at what those variables actually contain

In[1]:= x=0.1+(0.2+0.3);
y=(0.1+0.2)+0.3;

In[6]:= x //FullForm
Out[6]//FullForm= 0.6

In[7]:= y//FullForm
Out[7]//FullForm= 0.6000000000000001

In[8]:= x==y
Out[8]= True

So, what we have here is that x and y are demonstrably different and yet Mathematica says that they are equal. I understand what all of the other systems are doing since they are obeying IEEE arithmetic. I have no idea what Mathematica is choosing to do here.

11. Be careful not to fall into the trap of comparing two floating point numbers for equality. One should always compare within the machine’s epsilon value which relates to the rounding error precision of the processor. See that font of all knowledge Wikipedia on the matter, together with a method of comparing in MATLAB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_epsilon

My guess is that Mathematica is using this to say that, to its best approximation using the underlying hardware, the numbers are the same.

12. @Mike You’re right. Thanks for pointing it out.
When I did the same calculation with arbitrary precision both variables had the same value. I’ll post the question in http://mathematica.stackexchange.com to try to find out more.

13. Moreover, it is surprising that 0:0.1:1 actually works. In EMT, I use an internal epsilon to check for the last multiple of 0.1 to be 1 or not. An alternative would be to round 1/0.1 to 10 and using that number of steps.

By the way, in EMT, you can print the hexadecimal content of numbers. It also has a ~= operator, which checks for equality.

>x=0.1+(0.2+0.3);
>y=(0.1+0.2)+0.3;
>x==y
0
>x~=y
1
>printhex(x)
9.9999999999998*16^-1
>printhex(y)
9.99999999999A0*16^-1

14. Alex Henderson said “Be careful not to fall into the trap of comparing two floating point numbers for equality. ”

I completely agree. It is inadvisable to compare two floating point numbers for equality for many reasons with the issue demonstrated in this post being just one of them.

As R.G. ably demonstrates in the comment above, the two numbers we are considering are different at the bit level. If I ask a system if two different quantities are the same, I expect it to say ‘No’. Mathematica appears not to be doing that.

Reading this Mathematica Stack Exchange discussion – http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/43211/floating-point-addition-not-associative – it seems that Mathematica’s behaviour here is intentional. This raises the issue that if you prototype a floating point algorithm using Mathematica, you can’t guarantee that it will work as intended if you implement it in C, MATLAB, Python, Fortran or anything else!

15. Re R.G.: To do a loop the number of times you want:

for(x=x0; x+=dx; x 0).

16. Regarding 0:0.1:1 working (with the last value being exactly 1) — take a look at the bottom of the first column of the second page of this Cleve’s Corner article. It’s from a number of years ago, but it’s still valid.

You can display the hex form of numbers in MATLAB as well; use either the ‘hex’ option for the FORMAT function or use NUM2HEX.

If you know how many elements you want the vector you’re generating to have and the endpoints, use LINSPACE.

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/linspace.html

17. for (double x=x0; x+=dx; x<=x1+epsilon) !!!

18. @Mike Croucher Mathematica says that the numbers are equal with default adaptive precision:

x == y
(* True *)

x – y == 0
(* False *)

x – y == 0.
(* False *)

Accuracy[x – y]

(* 31.9092 *)

In order to have correct arithmetics one has to use an explicit precision:

accuracy = 40;
x = SetPrecision[0.1, accuracy] + (SetPrecision[0.2, accuracy] + SetPrecision[0.3, accuracy]);
y = (SetPrecision[0.1, accuracy] + SetPrecision[0.2, accuracy]) + SetPrecision[0.3, accuracy];

x == y
(* True *)

x – y == 0
(* True *)

so that the fullforms are essentially the same:

x // FullForm
(* 0.600000000000000005551115123125782702118158340454101562540. *)

y // FullForm
(* 0.600000000000000005551115123125782702118158340454101562540. *)

x – y // FullForm

(* 0“39.92081875395238 *)

thus it is zero with the precision used.

19. Thanks, Grisha. The issue that I have with Mathematica’s way of doing things is that its different from all other floating point implementations I know of. Thus, there is a risk that if you prototype code in Mathematica, it won’t work correctly when you re-implement in C, Fortran etc