hexspin.com

Limits to Accuracy

There are limits to how far I can accurately calculate values.   For example, pi to the 35th power is far beyond the capacity of a regular calculator or spreadsheet to calculate beyond 8 or 12 significant digits.

Fortunately, through marvelous resources available on the web (such as http://keisan.casio.com/calculator),  I can calculate to precision of 50 digits, well beyond the values I’m currently concerned with (17 digits).

In case you were wondering what that might look like:

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751^35 =  251330702007364298.6160889470975006569983291245888

As far as computing positions in the hexagon, Python3 is said to be able to calculate to arbitrarily large values, though the practical limit is 2^63 – 1 on a 64-bit platform – or in a number most of us would recognize:  9.22 * 10^18.

All my calculations are well below these values.