this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Funny

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[–] moonlight@fedia.io 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This sequence approximates an integer to arbitrary precision, not 8 specifically though, and never perfectly.

I tried it out using other bases, and the rule seems to be that doing this in base n results in n-2 with remainder n-1. So it doesn't ever actually converge, but the remainder becomes small very fast.

[–] match@pawb.social 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

never perfectly

eyes you in binary

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The sequence in base 2 is only 1/1.

Wonder how close base-16 gets.

FEDCBA987654321 / 123456789ABCDEF

[–] moonlight@fedia.io 10 points 2 days ago

Off by '1.82959E–16' !

[–] moonlight@fedia.io 4 points 2 days ago

Hmmmm.....

Edit: you can kinda think of it being 0, plus the 1/1 that would have ended up as a remainder in larger bases. In base 2, it just ends up being a full 1.