AMSC/CMSC 460 Quiz 1 ,Fall 2007
Show all work. You may leave arithmetic expressions in any form that
a calculator could evaluate. By putting your name on this paper, you agree
to abide by the university’s code of academic integrity in completing the
quiz. Use no books, calculators, cellphones, communication with others,
scratchpaper, etc.
Name
Student number
For this page of the quiz, assume you have a base 2 computer that stores
floating point numbers using a 5 bit normalized mantissa (x.xxxx), a 4 bit
exponent, and a sign for each. Assume that all numbers are chopped rather
than rounded.
1. (10) Consider the the following code fragment:
x = 1;
for j=1:2^ (20),
x = x + delta;
end
For the computer specified above, what is the largest value of delta for which
the final value of xis 1? Explain your reasoning.
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