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Random Interval Arithmetic Is Closer To Common Sense: An Observation, Rene Alt, Jean-Luc Lamotte, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

From the commonsense viewpoint, if on a bridge whose weight we know with an accuracy of 1 ton, we place a car whose weight we know with an accuracy of 5 kg, then the accuracy with which we know the overall weight of a bridge with a car on it should still be 1 ton. This is what an engineer or a physicist would say. Alas, this is not so in traditional interval arithmetic. In this paper, we show that, in contrast to traditional interval arithmetic, the random interval arithmetic (proposed by the first two authors) actually has this important …