If anybody wants to further play around with this, I wrote the following script in python using matplotlib:<p><pre><code> import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import struct
def power(x,p):
i = struct.unpack("i", struct.pack("f", x))[0]
i = (1-p) * 0x3f7a3bea + (p*i)
return struct.unpack("f", struct.pack("i", i))[0]
p = -0.5
xs = numpy.arange(0.1,100,0.1)
ys1 = map(lambda x: x**p, xs)
ys2 = map(lambda x: power(x, p), xs)
plt.plot(xs, ys1, label="Real function")
plt.plot(xs, ys2, label="Approximation")
plt.title("Graph of x^%d"%p)
plt.legend(loc="upper left")
plt.savefig("graph.png")
</code></pre>
Change p to whatever you want (even values greater than 1) to see different powers.