So apparently i cant math. I'm doing some stuff where I have 1 second to the pow of 5. That equals 1...

# random

[Colton Idle]

So apparently i cant math. I'm doing some stuff where I have 1 second to the pow of 5. That equals 1. but now i need ms instead of sec. and 1000 ^ 5 is like 100000000000000. do I need to divide the pow by like 1000 or something? lol. maybe i need sleep.

[Shawn]

What do you mean by having "1 second to the pow of 5"?

[Shawn]

are you describing a function that takes n seconds and raises it to the fifth power?

[Colton Idle]

yeah. i have a function that takes n seconds and raises it to the fifth power. everything works fine with it. and all expected cases (like 1 second) to the fifth power, should equal 1. but now i need to convert to mills so if I take in 1000 millis, i still need 1000 as the output of the func

[Shawn]

I guess you could convert to a BigDecimal, divide by 1000 to convert to seconds, do your arithmetic with seconds as normal, and then multiply by 1000 and convert to an int to yield milliseconds

[Shawn]

there's potential for loss in precision in that process though, something to keep in mind

[Shawn]

kinda seems like overkill though, depending on what exactly you need

[Colton Idle]

int to yeild whats that mean?

[Colton Idle]

precision isn't too important. but it has to be in the ballpark

[Shawn]

I mean "multiply your BigDecimal by 1000 and convert it back to an Int in order to yield `milliseconds`"

[Colton Idle]

gotcha. alright. let me try to see what i can come up with.

[Colton Idle]

i think my issue will be that something like the result of 0.5 to the power of 5 is not what i want. but 500ms to the power of 5 also is'nt what i want. hmm

[Colton Idle]

who knew taking an existing func that deals with seconds and converting to millis would give me a headache. lol

[Shawn]

hmm, true

[Shawn]

I think typically you'd write the method for milliseconds first and then do conversions to accept seconds lol

[Colton Idle]

my contraint here is basically i have tests already written and so they cant break. they already verify that the inputs and outputs (currently in seconds) are what they should be.

[Ruckus]

That's because your base assumption is wrong. (1 s)^5 is not 1 s, it's 1 s^5 (one "five dimensional second"), and 1 s^5 is not 1_000 ms^5, it's 1_000_000_000_000_000 ms^5 (1_000^5 ms^5). (Just like a unit cube is made of 8 half unit cubes, not 2.)

[Ruckus]

Always remember that units are not just pretty decorations for numbers.

[Klitos Kyriacou]

A typical example: 1 cubic metre = 1,000,000 cubic centimetres.
1 m³ = 100³ cm³
Note how the power applies to the units too.
But...
What on Earth does seconds to the power of 5 represent? It sounds very fishy. How can that possibly be useful?

[Colton Idle]

I wish I knew @Klitos Kyriacou lol
I'm just picking up from an existing codebase. But this convo at least made me realize I wasn't going crazy and missing something simple. Thanks everyone. Glad I asked the question

[Ruckus]

It's worth pointing out, that's one of the reasons things like time complexity are base on unit-less n (e.g. O(n^2)) and not on the time it takes n to happen. That way the end result is also unit-less (as opposed to time^2 in this case), and things like nested loops can still take place in one dimensional time.

[Ruckus]

@Colton Idle So if your original problem is something like "doing n operation takes s seconds to complete, so if we have a calculation that does that n operations in 5 nested loops, how long will it take?" you should be calculating n^5, not s^5. If all they give you is s, you need to factor out time to get to n before doing the calculation.

[Marcin Wisniowski]

What on Earth does seconds to the power of 5 represent?

1m/s = I moved 1 meter in a second
1m/s^2 = Every second I increased my movement speed by 1m/s
1m/s^3 = Every second I increased my acceleration rate by 1m/s^2
1m/s^4 = Every second I increased the rate of increase of my acceleration by 1m/s^3
1m/s^5 = Every second I increased the rate of increase of the rate of increase of my acceleration by 1m/s^4

[Marcin Wisniowski]

Far fetched when you get to ^5, but not unreal.

[Colton Idle]

Lol. I wish I knew. I didn't write this. I just got the instructions to change it.