244 Appendix E: A Detailed Look at f

All 10 digits of the approximations in i2 and i3 are identical: the accuracy of the approximation in i 3 is no better than the accuracy in i 2 despite the fact that the uncertainty in i 3 is less than the uncertainty in i 2. Why is this? Remember that the accuracy of any approximation depends primarily on the number of sample points at which the function f(x) has been evaluated. The f algorithm is iterated with increasing numbers of sample points until the disparity among three successive approximations is less than the uncertainty derived from the display format. After a particular iteration, the disparity among the approximations may already be so much less than the uncertainty that it would still be less if the uncertainty were decreased by a factor of 10. In such cases, if you decreased the uncertainty by specifying one more digit in the display format, the algorithm would not have to consider additional sample points, and the resulting approximation would be identical to the approximation calculated with the larger uncertainty.

If you calculated the two preceding approximations on your calculator, you may have noticed that it did not take any longer to calculate the integral in i3 than in i2. This is because the time to calculate the integral of a given function depends on the number of sample points at which the function must be evaluated to achieve an approximation of acceptable accuracy. For the i 3 approximation, the algorithm did not have to consider more sample points than it did in i 2, so it did not take any longer to calculate the integral.

Often, however, increasing the number of digits in the display format will require evaluating the function at additional sample points, so that calculating the integral will take more time. Now calculate the same integral in i4.

Keystrokes

Display

 

 

´i4

7.7858

–03

i4 display.

))

3.1416

00

Rolls down stack until upper

 

 

 

limit appears in X-register.

´f0

7.7807

–03

Integral approximated in i4.