language: en

Joseph D. Darcy
CS 270 Project Report, spring 1998

Narrowing Interval Bounds

1. Abstract Interval arithmetic is an automated attempt to give guaranteed upper and lower bounds of a numerical computation in the face of uncertainly in the input data and floating point roundoff during the calculation. While a simple interval equivalent of a rational function can be readily synthesized, the bounds from this construction may be too pessimistically large to be useful. This paper surveys a variety of techniques for refining the interval bounds. An appendix identifies issues with realizing floating point based interval arithmetic on current IEEE 754 compliant processors.

2. Introduction