This question already has answers here:
round() for float in C++
(23 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I have a double (call it x), meant to be 55 but in actuality stored as 54.999999999999943157 which I just realised.
So when I do
double x = 54.999999999999943157;
int y = (int) x;
y = 54 instead of 55!
This puzzled me for a long time. How do I get it to correctly round?
add 0.5 before casting (if x > 0) or subtract 0.5 (if x < 0), because the compiler will always truncate.
float x = 55; // stored as 54.999999...
x = x + 0.5 - (x<0); // x is now 55.499999...
int y = (int)x; // truncated to 55
C++11 also introduces std::round, which likely uses a similar logic of adding 0.5 to |x| under the hood (see the link if interested) but is obviously more robust.
A follow up question might be why the float isn't stored as exactly 55. For an explanation, see this stackoverflow answer.
Casting is not a mathematical operation and doesn't behave as such. Try
int y = (int)round(x);
Casting to an int truncates the value. Adding 0.5 causes it to do proper rounding.
int y = (int)(x + 0.5);
It is worth noting that what you're doing isn't rounding, it's casting. Casting using (int) x truncates the decimal value of x. As in your example, if x = 3.9995, the .9995 gets truncated and x = 3.
As proposed by many others, one solution is to add 0.5 to x, and then cast.
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
double x=54.999999999999943157;
int y=ceil(x);//The ceil() function returns the smallest integer no less than x
return 0;
}
Related
This question already has answers here:
How do I print a double value with full precision using cout?
(17 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I have the following calculation:
double a = 141150, b = 141270, c = 141410;
double d = (a + b + c) / 3;
cout << d << endl;
The output shows d = 141277, whereas d should be 141276.666667. The calculation consists of double additions and a double division. Why am I getting a result that is rounded up?? By the way d = (a + b + c) / 3.0 doesn't help.
However in another similar calculation, the result is correct:
double u = 1, v = 2, x = 3, y = 4;
double z = (u + v + x + y) / 4;
z results in 2.5 as expected. These two calculations are essentially the same, but why different behaviors?
Lastly, I know C++ automatically truncates numbers casted to lower precision, but I've never heard of automatic rounding. Can someone shed some light?
Here you can find multiple answers on the same problem with code snippets as examples. It does include what the guys said in the comments
I am trying to calculate the numerical gradient of a smooth function in c++. And the parameter value could vary from zero to a very large number(maybe 1e10 to 1e20?)
I used the function f(x,y) = 10*x^3 + y^3 as a testbench, but I found that if x or y is too large, I can't get correct gradient.
Here is my code to calculate the graidient:
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
#include <cassert>
using namespace std;
double f(double x, double y)
{
// black box expensive function
return 10 * pow(x, 3) + pow(y, 3);
}
int main()
{
// double x = -5897182590.8347721;
// double y = 269857217.0017581;
double x = 1.13041e+19;
double y = -5.49756e+14;
const double epsi = 1e-4;
double f1 = f(x, y);
double f2 = f(x, y+epsi);
double f3 = f(x, y-epsi);
cout << f1 << endl;
cout << f2 << endl;
cout << f3 << endl;
cout << f1 - f2 << endl; // 0
cout << f2 - f3 << endl; // 0
return 0;
}
If I use the above code to calculate the gradient, the gradient would be zero!
The testbench function, 10*x^3 + y^3, is just a demo, the real problem I need to solve is actually a black box function.
So, is there any "standard" way to calculate the numerical gradient?
In the first place, you should use the central difference scheme, which is more accurate (by cancellation of one more term of the Taylor develoment).
(f(x + h) - f(x - h)) / 2h
rather than
(f(x + h) - f(x)) / h
Then the choice of h is critical and using a fixed constant is the worst thing you can do. Because for small x, h will be too large so that the approximation formula no more works, and for large x, h will be too small, resulting in severe truncation error.
A much better choice is to take a relative value, h = x√ε, where ε is the machine epsilon (1 ulp), which gives a good tradeoff.
(f(x(1 + √ε)) - f(x(1 - √ε))) / 2x√ε
Beware that when x = 0, a relative value cannot work and you need to fall back to a constant. But then, nothing tells you which to use !
You need to consider the precision needed.
At first glance, since |y| = 5.49756e14 and epsi = 1e-4, you need at least ⌈log2(5.49756e14)-log2(1e-4)⌉ = 63 bits of significand precision (that is the number of bits used to encode the digits of your number, also known as mantissa) for y and y+epsi to be considered different.
The double-precision floating-point format only has 53 bits of significand precision (assuming it is 8 bytes). So, currently, f1, f2 and f3 are exactly the same because y, y+epsi and y-epsi are equal.
Now, let's consider the limit : y = 1e20, and the result of your function, 10x^3 + y^3. Let's ignore x for now, so let's take f = y^3. Now we can calculate the precision needed for f(y) and f(y+epsi) to be different : f(y) = 1e60 and f(epsi) = 1e-12. This gives a minimum significand precision of ⌈log2(1e60)-log2(1e-12)⌉ = 240 bits.
Even if you were to use the long double type, assuming it is 16 bytes, your results would not differ : f1, f2 and f3 would still be equal, even though y and y+epsi would not.
If we take x into account, the maximum value of f would be 11e60 (with x = y = 1e20). So the upper limit on precision is ⌈log2(11e60)-log2(1e-12)⌉ = 243 bits, or at least 31 bytes.
One way to solve your problem is to use another type, maybe a bignum used as fixed-point.
Another way is to rethink your problem and deal with it differently. Ultimately, what you want is f1 - f2. You can try to decompose f(y+epsi). Again, if you ignore x, f(y+epsi) = (y+epsi)^3 = y^3 + 3*y^2*epsi + 3*y*epsi^2 + epsi^3. So f(y+epsi) - f(y) = 3*y^2*epsi + 3*y*epsi^2 + epsi^3.
The only way to calculate gradient is calculus.
Gradient is a vector:
g(x, y) = Df/Dx i + Df/Dy j
where (i, j) are unit vectors in x and y directions, respectively.
One way to approximate derivatives is first order differences:
Df/Dx ~ (f(x2, y)-f(x1, y))/(x2-x1)
and
Df/Dy ~ (f(x, y2)-f(x, y1))/(y2-y1)
That doesn't look like what you're doing.
You have a closed form expression:
g(x, y) = 30*x^2 i + 3*y^2 j
You can plug in values for (x, y) and calculate the gradient exactly at any point. Compare that to your differences and see how well your approximation is doing.
How you implement it numerically is your responsibility. (10^19)^3 = 10^57, right?
What is the size of double on your machine? Is it a 64 bit IEEE double precision floating point number?
Use
dx = (1+abs(x))*eps, dfdx = (f(x+dx,y) - f(x,y)) / dx
dy = (1+abs(y))*eps, dfdy = (f(x,y+dy) - f(x,y)) / dy
to get meaningful step sizes for large arguments.
Use eps = 1e-8 for one-sided difference formulas, eps = 1e-5 for central difference quotients.
Explore automatic differentiation (see autodiff.org) for derivatives without difference quotients and thus much smaller numerical errors.
We can examine the behaviour of the error in the derivative using the following program - it calculates the 1-sided derivative and the central difference based derivative using a varying step size. Here I'm using x and y ~ 10^10, which is smaller than what you were using, but should illustrate the same point.
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
#include <cassert>
using namespace std;
double f(double x, double y) {
return 10 * pow(x, 3) + pow(y, 3);
}
double f_x(double x, double y) {
return 3 * 10 * pow(x,2);
}
double f_y(double x, double y) {
return 3 * pow(y,2);
}
int main()
{
// double x = -5897182590.8347721;
// double y = 269857217.0017581;
double x = 1.13041e+10;
double y = -5.49756e+10;
//double x = 10.1;
//double y = -5.2;
double epsi = 1e8;
for(int i=0; i<60; ++i) {
double dfx_n = (f(x+epsi,y) - f(x,y))/epsi;
double dfx_cd = (f(x+epsi,y) - f(x-epsi,y))/(2*epsi);
double dfx = f_x(x,y);
cout<<epsi<<" "<<fabs(dfx-dfx_n)<<" "<<fabs(dfx - dfx_cd)<<std::endl;
epsi/=1.5;
}
return 0;
}
The output shows that a 1-sided difference gets us an optimal error of about 1.37034e+13 at a step length of about 100.0. Note that while this error looks large, as a relative error it is 3.5746632302764072e-09 (since the exact value is 3.833e+21)
In comparison the 2-sided difference gets an optimal error of about 1.89493e+10 with a step size of about 45109.3. This is three-orders of magnitude better, (with a much larger step-size).
How can we work out the step size? The link in the comments of Yves Daosts answer gives us a ballpark value:
h=x_c sqrt(eps) for 1-Sided, and h=x_c cbrt(eps) for 2-Sided.
But either way, if the required step size for decent accuracy at x ~ 10^10 is 100.0, the required step size with x ~ 10^20 is going to be 10^10 larger too. So the problem is simply that your step size is way too small.
This can be verified by increasing the starting step-size in the above code and resetting the x/y values to the original values.
Then expected derivative is O(1e39), best 1-sided error of about O(1e31) occurs near a step length of 5.9e10, best 2-sided error of about O(1e29) occurs near a step length of 6.1e13.
As numerical differentiation is ill conditioned (which means a small error could alter your result significantly) you should consider to use Cauchy's integral formula. This way you can calculate the n-th derivative with an integral. This will lead to less problems with considering accuracy and stability.
I have problem with precision. I have to make my c++ code to have same precision as matlab. In matlab i have script which do some stuff with numbers etc. I got code in c++ which do the same as that script. Output on the same input is diffrent :( I found that in my script when i try 104 >= 104 it returns false. I tried to use format long but it did not help me to find out why its false. Both numbers are type of double. i thought that maybe matlab stores somewhere the real value of 104 and its for real like 103.9999... So i leveled up my precision in c++. It also didnt help because when matlab returns me value of 50.000 in c++ i got value of 50.050 with high precision. Those 2 values are from few calculations like + or *. Is there any way to make my c++ and matlab scrips have same precision?
for i = 1:neighbors
y = spoints(i,1)+origy;
x = spoints(i,2)+origx;
% Calculate floors, ceils and rounds for the x and y.
fy = floor(y); cy = ceil(y); ry = round(y);
fx = floor(x); cx = ceil(x); rx = round(x);
% Check if interpolation is needed.
if (abs(x - rx) < 1e-6) && (abs(y - ry) < 1e-6)
% Interpolation is not needed, use original datatypes
N = image(ry:ry+dy,rx:rx+dx);
D = N >= C;
else
% Interpolation needed, use double type images
ty = y - fy;
tx = x - fx;
% Calculate the interpolation weights.
w1 = (1 - tx) * (1 - ty);
w2 = tx * (1 - ty);
w3 = (1 - tx) * ty ;
w4 = tx * ty ;
%Compute interpolated pixel values
N = w1*d_image(fy:fy+dy,fx:fx+dx) + w2*d_image(fy:fy+dy,cx:cx+dx) + ...
w3*d_image(cy:cy+dy,fx:fx+dx) + w4*d_image(cy:cy+dy,cx:cx+dx);
D = N >= d_C;
end
I got problems in else which is in line 12. tx and ty eqauls 0.707106781186547 or 1 - 0.707106781186547. Values from d_image are in range 0 and 255. N is value 0..255 of interpolating 4 pixels from image. d_C is value 0.255. Still dunno why matlab shows that when i have in N vlaues like: x x x 140.0000 140.0000 and in d_C: x x x 140 x. D gives me 0 on 4th position so 140.0000 != 140. I Debugged it trying more precision but it still says that its 140.00000000000000 and it is still not 140.
int Codes::Interpolation( Point_<int> point, Point_<int> center , Mat *mat)
{
int x = center.x-point.x;
int y = center.y-point.y;
Point_<double> my;
if(x<0)
{
if(y<0)
{
my.x=center.x+LEN;
my.y=center.y+LEN;
}
else
{
my.x=center.x+LEN;
my.y=center.y-LEN;
}
}
else
{
if(y<0)
{
my.x=center.x-LEN;
my.y=center.y+LEN;
}
else
{
my.x=center.x-LEN;
my.y=center.y-LEN;
}
}
int a=my.x;
int b=my.y;
double tx = my.x - a;
double ty = my.y - b;
double wage[4];
wage[0] = (1 - tx) * (1 - ty);
wage[1] = tx * (1 - ty);
wage[2] = (1 - tx) * ty ;
wage[3] = tx * ty ;
int values[4];
//wpisanie do tablicy 4 pixeli ktore wchodza do interpolacji
for(int i=0;i<4;i++)
{
int val = mat->at<uchar>(Point_<int>(a+help[i].x,a+help[i].y));
values[i]=val;
}
double moze = (wage[0]) * (values[0]) + (wage[1]) * (values[1]) + (wage[2]) * (values[2]) + (wage[3]) * (values[3]);
return moze;
}
LEN = 0.707106781186547 Values in array values are 100% same as matlab values.
Matlab uses double precision. You can use C++'s double type. That should make most things similar, but not 100%.
As someone else noted, this is probably not the source of your problem. Either there is a difference in the algorithms, or it might be something like a library function defined differently in Matlab and in C++. For example, Matlab's std() divides by (n-1) and your code may divide by n.
First, as a rule of thumb, it is never a good idea to compare floating point variables directly. Instead of, for example instead of if (nr >= 104) you should use if (nr >= 104-e), where e is a small number, like 0.00001.
However, there must be some serious undersampling or rounding error somewhere in your script, because getting 50050 instead of 50000 is not in the limit of common floating point imprecision. For example, Matlab can have a step of as small as 15 digits!
I guess there are some casting problems in your code, for example
int i;
double d;
// ...
d = i/3 * d;
will will give a very inaccurate result, because you have an integer division. d = (double)i/3 * d or d = i/3. * d would give a much more accurate result.
The above example would NOT cause any problems in Matlab, because there everything is already a floating-point number by default, so a similar problem might be behind the differences in the results of the c++ and Matlab code.
Seeing your calculations would help a lot in finding what went wrong.
EDIT:
In c and c++, if you compare a double with an integer of the same value, you have a very high chance that they will not be equal. It's the same with two doubles, but you might get lucky if you perform the exact same computations on them. Even in Matlab it's dangerous, and maybe you were just lucky that as both are doubles, both got truncated the same way.
By you recent edit it seems, that the problem is where you evaluate your array. You should never use == or != when comparing floats or doubles in c++ (or in any languages when you use floating-point variables). The proper way to do a comparison is to check whether they are within a small distance of each other.
An example: using == or != to compare two doubles is like comparing the weight of two objects by counting the number of atoms in them, and deciding that they are not equal even if there is one single atom difference between them.
MATLAB uses double precision unless you say otherwise. Any differences you see with an identical implementation in C++ will be due to floating-point errors.
This question already has answers here:
Why does floating-point arithmetic not give exact results when adding decimal fractions?
(31 answers)
Why pow(10,5) = 9,999 in C++
(8 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
I've found an interesting floating point problem. I have to calculate several square roots in my code, and the expression is like this:
sqrt(1.0 - pow(pos,2))
where pos goes from -1.0 to 1.0 in a loop. The -1.0 is fine for pow, but when pos=1.0, I get an -nan. Doing some tests, using gcc 4.4.5 and icc 12.0, the output of
1.0 - pow(pos,2) = -1.33226763e-15
and
1.0 - pow(1.0,2) = 0
or
poss = 1.0
1.0 - pow(poss,2) = 0
Where clearly the first one is going to give problems, being negative. Anyone knows why pow is returning a number smaller than 0? The full offending code is below:
int main() {
double n_max = 10;
double a = -1.0;
double b = 1.0;
int divisions = int(5 * n_max);
assert (!(b == a));
double interval = b - a;
double delta_theta = interval / divisions;
double delta_thetaover2 = delta_theta / 2.0;
double pos = a;
//for (int i = 0; i < divisions - 1; i++) {
for (int i = 0; i < divisions+1; i++) {
cout<<sqrt(1.0 - pow(pos, 2)) <<setw(20)<<pos<<endl;
if(isnan(sqrt(1.0 - pow(pos, 2)))){
cout<<"Danger Will Robinson!"<<endl;
cout<< sqrt(1.0 - pow(pos,2))<<endl;
cout<<"pos "<<setprecision(9)<<pos<<endl;
cout<<"pow(pos,2) "<<setprecision(9)<<pow(pos, 2)<<endl;
cout<<"delta_theta "<<delta_theta<<endl;
cout<<"1 - pow "<< 1.0 - pow(pos,2)<<endl;
double poss = 1.0;
cout<<"1- poss "<<1.0 - pow(poss,2)<<endl;
}
pos += delta_theta;
}
return 0;
}
When you keep incrementing pos in a loop, rounding errors accumulate and in your case the final value > 1.0. Instead of that, calculate pos by multiplication on each round to only get minimal amount of rounding error.
The problem is that floating point calculations are not exact, and that 1 - 1^2 may be giving small negative results, yielding an invalid sqrt computation.
Consider capping your result:
double x = 1. - pow(pos, 2.);
result = sqrt(x < 0 ? 0 : x);
or
result = sqrt(abs(x) < 1e-12 ? 0 : x);
setprecision(9) is going to cause rounding. Use a debugger to see what the value really is. Short of that, at least set the precision beyond the possible size of the type you're using.
You will almost always have rounding errors when calculating with doubles, because the double type has only 15 significant decimal digits (52 bits) and a lot of decimal numbers are not convertible to binary floating point numbers without rounding. The IEEE standard contains a lot of effort to keep those errors low, but by principle it cannot always succeed. For a thorough introduction see this document
In your case, you should calculate pos on each loop and round to 14 or less digits. That should give you a clean 0 for the sqrt.
You can calc pos inside the loop as
pos = round(a + interval * i / divisions, 14);
with round defined as
double round(double r, int digits)
{
double multiplier = pow(digits,10);
return floor(r*multiplier + 0.5)/multiplier;
}
Strange things happen when i try to find the cube root of a number.
The following code returns me undefined. In cmd : -1.#IND
cout<<pow(( double )(20.0*(-3.2) + 30.0),( double )1/3)
While this one works perfectly fine. In cmd : 4.93242414866094
cout<<pow(( double )(20.0*4.5 + 30.0),( double )1/3)
From mathematical way it must work since we can have the cube root from a negative number.
Pow is from Visual C++ 2010 math.h library. Any ideas?
pow(x, y) from <cmath> does NOT work if x is negative and y is non-integral.
This is a limitation of std::pow, as documented in the C standard and on cppreference:
Error handling
Errors are reported as specified in math_errhandling
If base is finite and negative and exp is finite and non-integer, a domain error occurs and a range error may occur.
If base is zero and exp is zero, a domain error may occur.
If base is zero and exp is negative, a domain error or a pole error may occur.
There are a couple ways around this limitation:
Cube-rooting is the same as taking something to the 1/3 power, so you could do std::pow(x, 1/3.).
In C++11, you can use std::cbrt. C++11 introduced both square-root and cube-root functions, but no generic n-th root function that overcomes the limitations of std::pow.
The power 1/3 is a special case. In general, non-integral powers of negative numbers are complex. It wouldn't be practical for pow to check for special cases like integer roots, and besides, 1/3 as a double is not exactly 1/3!
I don't know about the visual C++ pow, but my man page says under errors:
EDOM The argument x is negative and y is not an integral value. This would result in a complex number.
You'll have to use a more specialized cube root function if you want cube roots of negative numbers - or cut corners and take absolute value, then take cube root, then multiply the sign back on.
Note that depending on context, a negative number x to the 1/3 power is not necessarily the negative cube root you're expecting. It could just as easily be the first complex root, x^(1/3) * e^(pi*i/3). This is the convention mathematica uses; it's also reasonable to just say it's undefined.
While (-1)^3 = -1, you can't simply take a rational power of a negative number and expect a real response. This is because there are other solutions to this rational exponent that are imaginary in nature.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x^(1/3),+x+from+-5+to+0
Similarily, plot x^x. For x = -1/3, this should have a solution. However, this function is deemed undefined in R for x < 0.
Therefore, don't expect math.h to do magic that would make it inefficient, just change the signs yourself.
Guess you gotta take the negative out and put it in afterwards. You can have a wrapper do this for you if you really want to.
function yourPow(double x, double y)
{
if (x < 0)
return -1.0 * pow(-1.0*x, y);
else
return pow(x, y);
}
Don't cast to double by using (double), use a double numeric constant instead:
double thingToCubeRoot = -20.*3.2+30;
cout<< thingToCubeRoot/fabs(thingToCubeRoot) * pow( fabs(thingToCubeRoot), 1./3. );
Should do the trick!
Also: don't include <math.h> in C++ projects, but use <cmath> instead.
Alternatively, use pow from the <complex> header for the reasons stated by buddhabrot
pow( x, y ) is the same as (i.e. equivalent to) exp( y * log( x ) )
if log(x) is invalid then pow(x,y) is also.
Similarly you cannot perform 0 to the power of anything, although mathematically it should be 0.
C++11 has the cbrt function (see for example http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/math/cbrt) so you can write something like
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
const double arg = 20.0*(-3.2) + 30.0;
std::cout << cbrt(arg) << "\n";
std::cout << cbrt(-arg) << "\n";
return 0;
}
I do not have access to the C++ standard so I do not know how the negative argument is handled... a test on ideone http://ideone.com/bFlXYs seems to confirm that C++ (gcc-4.8.1) extends the cube root with this rule cbrt(x)=-cbrt(-x) when x<0; for this extension you can see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CubeRoot.html
I was looking for cubit root and found this thread and it occurs to me that the following code might work:
#include <cmath>
using namespace std;
function double nth-root(double x, double n){
if (!(n%2) || x<0){
throw FAILEXCEPTION(); // even root from negative is fail
}
bool sign = (x >= 0);
x = exp(log(abs(x))/n);
return sign ? x : -x;
}
I think you should not confuse exponentiation with the nth-root of a number. See the good old Wikipedia
because the 1/3 will always return 0 as it will be considered as integer...
try with 1.0/3.0...
it is what i think but try and implement...
and do not forget to declare variables containing 1.0 and 3.0 as double...
Here's a little function I knocked up.
#define uniform() (rand()/(1.0 + RAND_MAX))
double CBRT(double Z)
{
double guess = Z;
double x, dx;
int loopbreaker;
retry:
x = guess * guess * guess;
loopbreaker = 0;
while (fabs(x - Z) > FLT_EPSILON)
{
dx = 3 * guess*guess;
loopbreaker++;
if (fabs(dx) < DBL_EPSILON || loopbreaker > 53)
{
guess += uniform() * 2 - 1.0;
goto retry;
}
guess -= (x - Z) / dx;
x = guess*guess*guess;
}
return guess;
}
It uses Newton-Raphson to find a cube root.
Sometime Newton -Raphson gets stuck, if the root is very close to 0 then the derivative can
get large and it can oscillate. So I've clamped and forced it to restart if that happens.
If you need more accuracy you can change the FLT_EPSILONs.
If you ever have no math library you can use this way to compute the cubic root:
cubic root
double curt(double x) {
if (x == 0) {
// would otherwise return something like 4.257959840008151e-109
return 0;
}
double b = 1; // use any value except 0
double last_b_1 = 0;
double last_b_2 = 0;
while (last_b_1 != b && last_b_2 != b) {
last_b_1 = b;
// use (2 * b + x / b / b) / 3 for small numbers, as suggested by willywonka_dailyblah
b = (b + x / b / b) / 2;
last_b_2 = b;
// use (2 * b + x / b / b) / 3 for small numbers, as suggested by willywonka_dailyblah
b = (b + x / b / b) / 2;
}
return b;
}
It is derives from the sqrt algorithm below. The idea is that b and x / b / b bigger and smaller from the cubic root of x. So, the average of both lies closer to the cubic root of x.
Square Root And Cubic Root (in Python)
def sqrt_2(a):
if a == 0:
return 0
b = 1
last_b = 0
while last_b != b:
last_b = b
b = (b + a / b) / 2
return b
def curt_2(a):
if a == 0:
return 0
b = a
last_b_1 = 0;
last_b_2 = 0;
while (last_b_1 != b and last_b_2 != b):
last_b_1 = b;
b = (b + a / b / b) / 2;
last_b_2 = b;
b = (b + a / b / b) / 2;
return b
In contrast to the square root, last_b_1 and last_b_2 are required in the cubic root because b flickers. You can modify these algorithms to compute the fourth root, fifth root and so on.
Thanks to my math teacher Herr Brenner in 11th grade who told me this algorithm for sqrt.
Performance
I tested it on an Arduino with 16mhz clock frequency:
0.3525ms for yourPow
0.3853ms for nth-root
2.3426ms for curt