[R] Odd underflow(?) error

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "TL" == Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu>
>>>>>     on Fri, 3 Dec 2004 15:22:07 -0800 (PST) writes:

    TL> On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, William Faulk wrote:
    >> I'm still trying to install R on my Irix machine.  Now I have a new problem 
    >> that crops up during the checks.  I've found the root cause, and it's that R 
    >> is returning zero for certain things for reasons I don't understand.
    >> 
    >> 2.225073859e-308, entered directly into R, responds "2.225074e-308".
    >> 2.225073858e-308 responds "0".
    >> 
    >> Their negative values respond similarly, so it would appear that somewhere in 
    >> there is the smallest absolute value that that installation of R will hold.

    TL> Yes.  .Machine$double.xmin tells you the smallest number representable to 
    TL> full precision, which is 2.225074e-308 (I think on all machines where R 
    TL> works)

    >> On another machine where the checks passed, both responses are correct, not 
    >> just the first one.  The underflow there is significantly lower, with much 
    >> less accuracy, as opposed to what seems to be good accuracy on what looks 
    >> like the broken one.  The values there are:
    >> 
    >> 2.4703282293e-324 gives 4.940656e-324
    >> 2.4703282292e-324 gives 0

    TL> Machines can differ in what they do with numbers smaller than 
    TL> .Machine$double.xmin. They can report zero, or they can add leading zeros 
    TL> and so lose precision.  Suppose you had a 4-digit base 10 machine with 2 
    TL> digits of exponent.  The smallest number representable to full accuracy 
    TL> would be
    TL> 1.000e-99
    TL> but by allowing the leading digits to be zero you could represent
    TL> 0.001e-99
    TL> ie, 1e-102, to one digit accuracy (these are called "denormalized" 
    TL> numbers).

    TL> My Mac laptop denormalizes, and agrees with your other computer, giving 
    TL> the smallest representable number as 4.940656e-324. It is 
    TL> .Machine$double.xmin/2^52.   This number has very few bits left to 
    TL> represent values, so for example
    >> (a/2^52)*1.3==(a/2^52)
    TL> [1] TRUE
    TL> where a is .Machine$double.xmin

(very nice explanation, thanks Thomas!)


    TL> Both your machines should be correct. I don't think we deliberately 
    TL> require denormalized numbers to work anywhere.

yes, indeed.
I can imagine that some of regression tests (aka "validation" !)
implicitly use some property -- but as Thomas said, that's not
deliberate (and a buglet in our tests).

William, could you move this topic from R-help to R-devel and
give more specifics about what is failing for your installation?

Martin