Monday, August 10, 2009

World Series - Infinite Series

I was wondering what was involved in computing transcendental functions. sin or cos (whatever) in those early HP calculators, and doing it whith a rudimentry processor. After chatting with a mathematician friend he thinks they used reduction and aproximation or an infinite series (like Taylor...).

It's one thing doing that on paper, quite another doing it with basically rotate and add and a few registers.
I mean I have even got an assembler listing for a Sin() function on the 6502 and it's still tough going.
Those guys really earned their bread and butter.
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