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Computers are smarter than humans


Road Runner

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I keep a live record of my stocks on Google Sheets and also back it up on my computer using the free, almost-identical-to-Excel WPS Office Spreadsheets.

The information is identical for the stocks, but the rounding differences end up with sums and other calculations being very slightly different.  The six numbers in the Sheets example below were copied to the WPS cells and still don't completely agree due to each one's rounding rules!

Google Sheets as of right now:

image.png.263977a51ffa4337df35a6ff069288a6.png

WPS Spreadsheets as of right now:

image.png.2c33cf7de7965ba1cdda9913b6ee7884.png

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Getting 89% instead of 90% is really surprising because even if it wasn't exact, scientists and mathematicians are taught to ROUND TO EVEN - and 9 is not even!

Did you know that scientists and mathematicians do NOT round .5 up to 1 as we were taught in grade school?

This applies to MEASURED numbers which we do not know exactly to an infinite amount of places.

If you add: 0.5 + 1.5 + 2.5 + 3.5 that equals 8.0.

But if you round the grade school way first it's: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10

So scientists and mathematicians ROUND TO EVEN to account for the fact that .5 is as close to the next whole number down as the next whole number up.

If you round the scientific way first it's: 0 + 2 + 2 + 4 = 8.

The same is true for rounding anything ending in "5" to the next greater place.

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