Related papers: Dividing by zero - how bad is it, really?
Basic arithmetic is the cornerstone of mathematics and computer sciences. In arithmetic, 'division by zero' is an undefined operation and any attempt at extending logic for algebraic division to incorporate division by zero has resulted in…
How to handle division in systems that compute with logical formulas involving what would otherwise be polynomial constraints over the real numbers is a surprisingly difficult question. This paper argues that existing approaches from both…
As inductive inference and machine learning methods in computer science see continued success, researchers are aiming to describe ever more complex probabilistic models and inference algorithms. It is natural to ask whether there is a…
There has been always an ambiguity in division when zero is present in the denominator. So far this ambiguity has been neglected by assuming that division by zero as a non-allowed operation. In this paper, I have derived the new set of…
If a discrete probability distribution in a model being tested for goodness-of-fit is not close to uniform, then forming the Pearson chi-square statistic can involve division by nearly zero. This often leads to serious trouble in practice…
We consider the problem of accurate computation of the finite difference $f(\x+\s)-f(\x)$ when $\Vert\s\Vert$ is very small. Direct evaluation of this difference in floating point arithmetic succumbs to cancellation error and yields 0 when…
Number partitioning is one of the classical NP-hard problems of combinatorial optimization. It has applications in areas like public key encryption and task scheduling. The random version of number partitioning has an "easy-hard" phase…
A countable structure is indivisible if for every coloring with finite range there is a monochromatic isomorphic subcopy of the structure. Each indivisible structure naturally corresponds to an indivisibility problem which outputs such a…
We characterize some major algorithmic randomness notions via differentiability of effective functions. (1) As the main result we show that a real number z in [0,1] is computably random if and only if each nondecreasing computable function…
A crucial part of data analysis is the validation of the resulting estimators, in particular, if several competing estimators need to be compared. Whether an estimator can be objectively validated is not a trivial property. If there exists…
While there is a well-established notion of what a computable ordinal is, the question which functions on the countable ordinals ought to be computable has received less attention so far. We propose a notion of computability on the space of…
Computational problems are classified into computable and uncomputable problems. If there exists an effective procedure (algorithm) to compute a problem then the problem is computable otherwise it is uncomputable. Turing machines can…
Given a set of integers W, the Partition problem determines whether W can be divided into two disjoint subsets with equal sums. We model the Partition problem as a system of polynomial equations, and then investigate the complexity of a…
We give a~detailed construction of the complete ordered field of real numbers by means of infinite decimal expansions. We prove that in the canonical encoding of decimals neither addition nor multiplication is {\em computable}, but that…
Inspired by Quantum Mechanics, we reformulate Hilbert's tenth problem in the domain of integer arithmetics into problems involving either a set of infinitely-coupled non-linear differential equations or a class of linear Schr\"odinger…
A physical system is determined by a finite set of initial conditions and "laws" represented by equations. The system is computable if we can solve the equations in all instances using a "finite body of mathematical knowledge". In this…
Writing correct distributed programs is hard. In spite of extensive testing and debugging, software faults persist even in commercial grade software. Many distributed systems, especially those employed in safety-critical environments,…
Since many real-world problems arising in the fields of compiler optimisation, automated software engineering, formal proof systems, and so forth are equivalent to the Halting Problem--the most notorious undecidable problem--there is a…
Let $b \geq 3$ be a positive integer. A natural number is said to be a base-$b$ Zuckerman number if it is divisible by the product of its base-$b$ digits. Let $\mathcal{Z}_b(x)$ be the set of base-$b$ Zuckerman numbers that do not exceed…
All sieve methods for the Goldbach problem sift out all the composite numbers; even though, strictly speaking, it is not necessary to do so and which is, in general, very difficult. Some new methods introduced in this paper show that the…