gap-sweep
At its defaults it draws what a perturbation of 10⁻⁶ moves, against the gap it is applied across. Three curves against the gap between two eigenvalues, both axes logarithmic. Two are flat; the third rises steeply as the gap closes and then levels off.
gap-sweep is one function in lib/figures/subspace.js —
subspaces — the gap, the eigenvector, and the plane that survives both. Everything below came out of it during this build, at
arguments taken from the essays rather than invented for this page. A figure here is the
figure a reader meets in an essay, and if the generator changes, this page changes with it.
At its defaults
Drawn even though every essay passes arguments — which on this site is every essay, at 100% of placements since the standard pass. A default nothing exercises is a trap for the next essay to call this with none, and this is the page where a default that has drifted from the figures around it becomes visible.
Three curves against the gap between two eigenvalues, both axes logarithmic. Two are flat; the third rises steeply as the gap closes and then levels off.
size: 0.000001
The arguments are the ones A condition number for one eigenvalue passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
Three curves against the gap between two eigenvalues, both axes logarithmic. Two are flat; the third rises steeply as the gap closes and then levels off.
What it checked while drawing
Every figure above asserted its own claims on the way to being drawn, and a claim that failed
would have failed the build rather than drawn a wrong picture. Those assertions used to leave
no trace at all: a passing one returned true and the only evidence the figure had
checked anything was that nothing crashed. The list below is what they actually said, collected
by running this generator with an observer installed — not a description of
what it is believed to check.
8 distinct claims across 2 sets of arguments, grouped below by shape — because most of them are one sentence with a different number in it, and how many separate times that sentence was put to the test is the informative part.
a perturbation small enough to be a perturbation
and neither does the plane's angle
and the plane stays inside its own bound
Jacobi needs a symmetric matrix
matmul shapes agree
no eigenvalue moves by more than the perturbation
the eigenvalue shift does not move with the gap
while the eigenvector's angle moves by orders of magnitude
Against the rule
The rule does not apply to it. It factorises nothing, so there is no residual it could be withholding. That is worth stating rather than leaving blank: a site that reported the rule as satisfied by every generator would be counting mostly generators the rule never reached.
Across the library: the rule bites on 52
of 99 generators —
37 print a residual and
15 are exempt with a published reason;
47 factorise nothing.
Read from lib/residual-rule.js, which is the same body the gate enforces from,
and the gate's last check fails the build if this page and it disagree about any generator.
Where it is called
Changing this generator changes every figure on this list. That is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.
A condition number for one eigenvalue
In the symmetric case every eigenvalue has condition number exactly one. In this four-by-four matrix two of them have condition number 100.005 and the other two have exactly 1, and the number belongs to the eigenvalue rather than to the matrix.
Eigenvalues, singular values, rankSymmetry is worth more than precision
A symmetric matrix gives up its eigenvalues to full accuracy however ill-conditioned it is. An unsymmetric one can move them by the eighth root of a perturbation, so the rounding involved in merely storing the matrix shifts the spectrum by a hundredth.
Two errors, and whose fault they areThe exact answer to a nearby problem
A good algorithm does not give an approximate answer to your problem. It gives the exact answer to a problem very close to yours — and once that is the definition, a wrong result has two possible authors and they can be measured apart.
Eigenvalues, singular values, rankThe gap decides the eigenvector
A symmetric matrix's eigenvalues move by at most the size of the perturbation, whatever the spectrum looks like. Its eigenvectors are governed by a completely different quantity — the distance to the neighbouring eigenvalue — and at a gap of 10⁻⁹ the same perturbation turns them through 27°.
Eigenvalues, singular values, rankThe plane survives what its vectors do not
At a gap of 10⁻⁹ a perturbation of 10⁻⁶ turns the two eigenvectors through half a radian and turns the plane they span through 7.6·10⁻⁸ — a ratio of six million. Ask for the subspace instead of the vectors and a hopeless computation becomes a well-conditioned one, with no change to the arithmetic.
Least squares, and the road not to takeThe valley with no bottom
A degree-nine fit's coefficients can be moved by a third of their own size before the residual changes in the sixth significant figure. The arithmetic did not lose those digits. The data never contained them.
Eigenvalues, singular values, rankTwo shifts that are never formed
The double shift is defined as a factorisation of (A − μI)(A − μ̄I), which nobody computes. What is computed is the first column of that product — three numbers — and the bulge those three numbers create, pushed down the subdiagonal by n − 2 reflectors until it falls off the bottom.