Very cool. <nitpick>...but there's still a comparison; it's just hidden in the abs() function: (roughly:) abs(x) := x >= 0 ? x : -x.</nitpick>

[OT] Reminds me of a programming assignment where we were supposed to put the square roots of the integers from 1-100 inclusive into two groups with roughly equal sums. I used the fact that sqrt(x) + sqrt(x+3) is very close to sqrt(x+1) + sqrt(x+2) and managed to outperform all the other submissions by several orders of magnitude in both speed and "difference in sum". (Yea math!)

In reply to Re: Finding the max()/min() by benizi
in thread Finding the max()/min() by dragonchild

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.