http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12247590/

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.30.html#subj19.2

Just so I’m clear, I’m not entirely sure if this story was due to a rounding error, but there seem to be a few posts (hopefully not careless ones) out there that imply that it was.  I don’t believe the phone company has released their version of the report.  With that in mind, here is what happened:

About two years ago, a Malaysian man received a $218 trillion phone from Telecom Malaysia, the phone company, with the instructions of paying the bill within 10 days or be faced with legal prosecution.  No joke.

Yahaya Wahab, the unfortunate victim, stated that he had disconnected the phone line after his father’s death and that it was OBVIOUSLY a mistake.

One possibility was that his phone line was used illegally and this bill, therefore, is legit (I don’t know about that).  The other more probable reason to the phone bill was that it was a rounding error by the phone company while calculating the bill and they are just reluctant to admit it.  I suppose another reason could be just a flat out misprint by the phone company on his bill.

One post I read stated that a rounding error here is in fact possible if the programmer had a debate about using binary versus decimal arithmetic and chose binary arithmetic at the end.  Another argument was that the programmer did not allocate enough space for the calculations to occur.  I guess my rebuttal to that would be how could it have stored a number as big as $218 trillion.

I have put this post out for debate purposes.  Do you think a rounding error could have caused an error like this to occur, or was it do you think that it was more likely due to the incompetence of the phone company?