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xkcd #217: e to the pi Minus pi (31 Jan 2007)
(programming.dev)
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8653164
Transcript:
Cueball: Hey, check it out: e^π^−π is 19.999099979. That's weird.
Black Hat: Yeah. That's how I got kicked out of the ACM in college.
Cueball: ...what?Black Hat: During a competition, I told the programmers on our team that e^π^−π was a standard test of floating-point handlers -- it would come out to 20 unless they had rounding errors.
Cueball: That's awful.
Black Hat: Yeah, they dug through half their algorithms looking for the bug before they figured it out.
Hover text:
Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2^ + 19^2^/22) is pi.
Comics are not only meant to present something that can happen IRL :P
That kind of trolls happen occasionally in IT, where not everybody know well about maths and physics, they may easily fall into these kind of traps by taking granted that the maths you gave is more trustful than computer code they wrote (usual kind of joke to make your friend understand that he what was doing something wrong or without understanding)
Also, in Uni, we were all little Satans, trying more to break others students works instead of trying to improve self (that was a true war among IT students). All means were used, this kind of troll (as depicted in this comics) to make the other loose time is truly expected
Classical "type Alt+F4 before saving your code to automatically fix bugs" kind of joke