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General discussion (archive)A math question(3 posts)(3 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 01, 2012
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ChaunceyK: [snipitty-snip]but how is it used to make our lives better?
Short answer:
It's used to make video games.

Longer answer:
When you go about programing any sort of AI for a computer game you'll need to use square root to determine the distance of any two given points on the screen.
Posted October 01, 2012
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ChaunceyK: how is it used to make our lives better?
Engineering :-)
For example: http://wtnasa.com/
Posted October 04, 2012
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ThomasPierson: If a square root must be used to represent an approximation then the concept of accuracy ceases to be absolute and becomes relative.
Actually it's exactly the opposite :-) Square root of a given number is an exact value. Only if you try to calculate it and represent as a decimal number you get an approximation.

As for why it exists in the first place - if you like a more philosophical answer, it's a link between stuff in two dimensions (surface of a square) and stuff in one dimension (side of a square). If you want to go from three dimensions to one (cube volume to cube height) you use a cube root, and so on :-)
Pages:
1
This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussion (archive)A math question(3 posts)(3 posts)
(3 posts)