Calculating the mean of a list of numbers (2016)
If you&#x27;re reaching these values then it&#x27;s extremely likely that either:<p>(a) You&#x27;re doing something wrong (usually, not standardizing your data, etc.) which means that you&#x27;re not thinking about the fact that computers have finite numerical precision and adjusting your problem accordingly (e.g., have a wide dynamic range of numbers).<p>Or, (b) your problem is pretty ill-conditioned and there&#x27;s probably no solving it in any useful way unless you crank up the precision.<p>Almost every problem I&#x27;ve encountered of this form (whenever I&#x27;ve worked on optimizers, or, more generally, solving problems) is of type (a). There aren&#x27;t many more choices if your problem is of type (b), since you&#x27;re almost always losing digits somewhere in any implementation of a numerical algorithm.<p>The mean of two numbers is a particularly <i>easy</i> example to analyze, but I don&#x27;t think that the implementation is &quot;wrong&quot; since every (even slightly more complicated) numerical algorithm will run into the same problems. I think this is a good post in its content, I just don&#x27;t agree with the author&#x27;s final interpretation.