<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Oct 26, 6:56 pm, "Chris Mellon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > What in the world are you trying to count? > > The calculation looks like this > > A = 0.35 > T = 0.30 > C = 0.25 > G = 0.10 > > and then I basically continually multiply those numbers together. I > need to do it like 200,000+ times but that's nuts. I can't even do it > 1000 times or the number rounds off to 0.0. I tried taking the inverse > of these numbers as I go but then it just shoots up to "inf". Yeah right. Nuts it is. 0.35*0.3*0.25*0.1 is approximately a third of a third of a quarter of a tenth, or more precisely 2.625 parts in a thousand. So after the second set of mutiplies, you have about 6.89 parts in a million, and then 0.18 parts in a billion after the third, and so on - the exponent grows by between -3 and -2 on every iteration. So 0.002625**200000 is a number so small that its about as close as you can practically get to bugger-all, as it is less than 10 ** -400000, and more than 10**-600000 Now I have heard rumours that there are approximately 10**80 elementary particles in the universe, so this is much less than one of them, even if my rumour is grossly wrong. A light year is of the order of 9.46*10**18 millimetres, and no human has ever been that far away from home. Call it 10**19 for convenience. So your number slices the last millimetre in a light year into more than 10**399981 parts. Have you formulated the problem that you are trying to solve properly? - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
