So Beckley got a hold of the MetroCard Math site and built on top of David’s fantastic work to build even more prettiness, neat-workingness, and general niftitude into the site.
We also put in a thingee – well, by ‘we’ I mean ‘he’ – he put in a thingee that lets you see how the new price changes will affect you. For me, I definitely will be sticking with the pay-per-ride.
And another thing – I actually tested the new (divisible-by-a-nickel) magic number, and it *does* work. My MetroCard has an exactly even number of rides on it. Cool. Now I just have to do something with all these MetroCards that have 10 or 20 cents on them – perhaps a new part of the site that lets you put in how much money is on your cards, and then it tells you how much more to put on to get it ‘even’? Not a bad idea…
Gory Details: so, talk to any computer sciencey person and they will always tell you that Floating Point Math is Hard. I have only rarely run into this, but the rounding algorithms are very specific when you buy stuff, and if you’re off by a penny, then, well, you’re off by a penny, and things stop working. We found a couple of minor (off-by-one) bugs here and there, and every time it seems like I fixed one, the rest of the results would start to go haywire. The real problem is that I am trying to ‘move’ the rounding around the formula:
round_for_money($x * 1.15) = n * $2.25
Now solve for ‘x’, and let ‘n’ be any integer – well, that pesky ’round()’ is in the way, and if you just try to move it to the other side, or round at some random and/or inopportune time, then when you get back to the original equation, sometimes the numbers don’t work out anymore. It sucks.
So I racked and racked my brain trying to figure out a way to do my simple solve-for-x routine. I really just want to try different integers for ‘n’ until I find an answer that’s “acceptable.” But that doesn’t work. At all. Or at least, I don’t know what mathematical operation I can do to move that round() function off the left side so I can try to have a formula that points to ‘x’.
What did I do finally? I gave up. I left the formula as it is above, and just run ‘x’ from 0 to “a lot” (a thousand bucks or a hundred bucks I think?). The answer I get is going to be completely accurate, but it wastes computing power. Well, too bad, your browser has to do a little bit of multiplication in a loop. My condolences. But! The result is, I’m pretty convinced my answers are to-the-penny accurate now. We’ll see when the big price change kicks in.
Thanks again to David Dominguez for the initial switch to jQuery-powered MetroCard Math, and thanks to Beckley for the full re-skinning he pulled off.