Talk:The special case of zero to the zeroth power

According to a hurricane (very long story), Siri the iPhone app thinks that 0^0 = 0. Since I don't have an iPhone, I have not personally verified this. Alonso del Arte 07:25, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

You say: "Yes, it's a common misconception, and the iPhone Siri seems to reinforce that misconception." Why do you put such an emphasis on a software bug? They count in millions. And how many people use the Siri iPhone app to calculate 0^0? I did not. You did not. Peter Luschny 18:12, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Alright, of the many people who told me 0^0 = 0, only one of them used her iPhone before answering, and the fact that it was Siri telling her that made her super-convinced that it was the right answer. But it occurs to me that maybe she asked it wrong, maybe she said 0 times 0 and not 0 to the 0th power. If you have an iPhone with Siri, could you test it? Alonso del Arte 23:16, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

No, I have no iPhone. However, I have an idea. Get, for example, Galaxy Nexus, or any other Android phone. Get the Sage app. (Warning, it is public beta right now.) Compute 0^0. If you find 0^0 <> 1, no problem: sage-android is free software, the source code is here. Get it and fix it! Happy 0^0! Peter Luschny 21:46, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Peter, I don't have any kind of mobile device. I just want to verify that Siri does in fact think 0^0 = 0 or find out if the user who told me that put the question in wrong. Alonso del Arte 16:19, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

External links

I do read the links given before adding "new" ones. I'd like to know what you didn't like about the link

Alex Lopez-Ortiz, What is 0^0, Fri Feb 20 21:45:30 EST 1998.

— Daniel Forgues 17:54, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Presumably that it was already posted. Charles R Greathouse IV 18:54, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

IEEE

It is not really correct that "In IEEE arithmetic and thus many programming languages, the result is not a number (NaN)". According to the standard, the result of the pow and powf functions is 1.0 (with no error). The standard defines an additional function powr with the value NaN for (0,0), but this function is not widely available. Fredrik Johansson 15:42, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm commenting out that line for now. What you're saying does seem to agree with what Wikipedia says, but I can't consider that definitive until I read the standard for myself with my own eyes. Right now, I'm not on a computer with access to the IEEE library. But I have been using Google Books to look at the Handbook of Floating Point Arithmetic by Muller et al. Very interesting, but I'm not yet finding an answer to this particular quandary. Alonso del Arte 17:11, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, you're right -- for some reason I was looking at the section for 0/0. 9.2.1 says that 0^0 is 1 regardless of whether the exponent is exact or inexact. Charles R Greathouse IV 22:50, 23 January 2012 (UTC)