ESA's Schiaparelli Mars probe crashed because of integer overflow
Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sat Nov 26 15:13:27 PST 2016
On 11/26/2016 3:16 AM, deadalnix wrote:
> On Saturday, 26 November 2016 at 05:50:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> It reminds me of college, where we were told that if we worked a problem and
>> came up with unreasonable answers, such as negative energy, we were expected
>> to note:
>>
>> "I know this answer is unreasonable, but I cannot find the mistake."
>>
>> and the worst you'd get is a 0. Unreasonable answers, and no note, meant you'd
>> get a negative score!
>
> You got a great teacher right there !
>
It was actually institute policy, not an individual teacher's. Another policy is
no grades can be based on attendance (unless it was P.E.). A third is that if
you can pass the finals, you can opt out of any class and yet receive full
credit for it. A fourth was grades will not be on a curve - you either met the
standard or you didn't.
There's more.
Oh, one more you'll recognize. You'd get a 0 on any computation where you
prematurely rounded the results :-) The algebra had to be worked out to its
final form before plugging in numbers. (Lots of times intermediate terms would
algebraically cancel out, so calculating intermediate values would result in
spurious rounding errors.)
I thought it was a fairly enlightened system of grading, quite a step up from
what I was used to.
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