Question

shiroo:I am not understanding epsilon and numguesses please help.

Answer 1

epsilon is generally used to depicit the level of accuracy you want in your answer.....
consider a statement in program to find square root

if mod(x - (ans*ans)) <= epsilon:
this means that the answer you require is such that it no more or less that epsilon from the actual answer

one important thing doing ans*ans == x is a bad thing because when you increment what you expect from normal mathematics or rather number system , the computer may have a slightly different representation for eg. 0.1 is not exactly 0.1 for the computer
so we always introduce some term such as epsilon that will determine the level of accuracy we want in our answer

as regaring numguesses it`s just number of guesses you made to get to your answer
in sqrt program it`s simply the number of iterations of the while loop

hope you got your answer if still any doubt please do ask.....

Answer 2

when working with floating point numbers, you will not get an exact result. using a tolerance with numeric comparisons will allow you to compensate for that. you need to choose the tolerance based on your accuracy needs. in this case epsilon is the variable for this tolerance.