Euler realised that mariners did not need to know the phase of the moon with absolute accuracy, only with enough precision to locate their own position to within a few nautical miles. Consequently Euler developed a recipe for generating an imperfect but sufficiently accurate solution. The recipe, known as an algorithm, worked by first obtaining a rough-and-ready result, which could then be fed back into the algorithm to generate a more refined result. This refined result could then be fed back into the algorithm to generate an even more accurate result, and so on. A hundred or so iterations
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