Question

I am making a Java program to calculate Simpson’s rule for integrals. Here is the code I have. Notice the second column of numbers in the output values of count == 4,9,10,11. They are not numbers that I need, they do not follow the pattern. I need these numbers to be accurate. What is going on and how can I fix it?

public static void main(String[] args) 
{
   double totalS = 0.0;
   int count = 0;

   for(double i=0; i< 4; i += 0.4 )
   {
          count++;
          totalS += Sfunction(i, count);
          System.out.println(count + " " + i + " " + totalS);
   }
}

public static double Sfunction(double f1, int count)
{
    double value;

    if (f1 == 0.0 || f1 == 4.0)
        value = Math.cos(Math.sqrt(f1));
    else if ((count % 2) == 1)
        value = 2 * Math.cos(Math.sqrt(f1));
    else
        value = 4 * Math.cos(Math.sqrt(f1));

    return value;
}

I get the output of:

1    0.0    1.0 
2    0.4    4.226313639540303
3    0.8    5.478244888601832
4    1.2000000000000002    7.30884788480188
5    1.6    7.911122809972827
6    2.0    8.534897589034324
7    2.4    8.578100205110182
8    2.8    8.168723348285942
9    3.1999999999999997    7.736055200662704
10   3.5999999999999996    6.452869366954546
11   3.9999999999999996    5.620575693860261

Answer 1

Each time you go round your loop, you are compounding the error in the inexact addition of 0.4 to i.

Instead, use an integral value for the loop counter, and scale that to get a better approximation to the values:

    for ( int count = 0; count < 10; ++count ) {
        final double i = 0.4 * count;
        System.out.println ( ( count + 1 ) + " " + i );
    }

This will not eliminate the floating point error, but it will mean it is not increasing at each iteration. To remove the error from the output, format the output to a reasonable number of decimal places:

    for ( int count = 0; count < 10; ++count ) {
        final double i = 0.4 * count;
        System.out.printf ( "%2d %.1f\n", ( count + 1 ), i );
    }