A faster and more accurate sum - Loren on the Art of MATLAB

[poster]

Today's guest blogger is Christine Tobler, who's a developer at MathWorks working on core numeric functions.Hi everyone! I'd like to tell you a story about round-off error, the algorithm used in sum, and compability issues. Over the last few years, my colleague Bobby Cheng has made changes to sum to make it both more accurate and faster, and I thought it would be an interesting story to tell here.Table of ContentsNumerical issues in sumDifferent ways of computing the sumMaking changes to sumReferences about accurately computing the sumHelper FunctionsNumerical issues in sumEven for a simple function like sum, with floating-point numbers the order in which we sum them up matters:x = (1 + 1e-16) + 1e-16x =

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