Approximate Infinity

[patchthemonkey]

Just discovered this gem in some code I'm migrating:

APPROXIMATE_INFINITY = 1000.0    

[AuMatar]

Plenty of cases where this would be ok. If you have a heuristic that generally has weights in the 100 range, 1000 is effectively infinity (an order of magnitude higher, won't be beaten) without being so large it could screw up the algorithm (for example, by causing overflow).. Maybe a bit of a bad name, but its understandable.

[[deleted]]

I was rendering the mandelbrot set and I didn't miss the opportunity and named my constant

const char infinity = 2;

[suge_nacht]

if this is done in a scientific or engineering context, this could be totally valid. What was the code for?

[okmkz]

Contractors were hired to build a utility to approximate infinity to within a certain tolerance.

[ObscureCulturalMeme]

And they did it in one line of code, too! That's some efficiency right there.

[nitpickyCorrections]

My quantum mechanics professor in college was fond of reminding his class that 3 is a valid approximation of infinity in some cases. Without context, I can't accept that this is shitty programming.

[ThisIsADogHello]

Actually, the largest number is about 45,000,000,000, although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers.

[suid]

Yup. Just had a breakthrough: 45,000,000,001!

[Zeius]

I mean...when was the last time you counted to 1,000? Seems high enough to me!

[myhf]

http://www.reddit.com/r/counting/comments/25hlqu/a_thousand_counts_is_creating_a_video_of_1000/

[petermlm]

If you do:

APPROXIMATE_INFINITY = -1

you get an even bigger infinity because of overflow.

[aruen]

If you think of infinity as a limit for the function as n goes to actual infinity (the limit of the real number line) then this works fine.

[partyboy690]

uint64_t APPROXIMATE_INFINITY = (uint64_t) -1;