4 ms·
> Does anyone know more about this? Are there any chips out there that support it? Not an answer to your question, but I found out recently that there is defin
by gajjanag 10y ago
> Does anyone know more about this? Are there any chips out there that support it?
Not an answer to your question, but I found out recently that there is definitely significant interest in ideas like interval arithmetic in hardware among mathematicians.
The application I am somewhat familiar with is "brute forcing" proofs of inequalities, which can get very annoying, even for apparently easy stuff like 2 variable ones.
Indeed, "The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics" edited by N. Higham et al has an entire article on this (in section II.20). In particular, the article has a reference to a library called filib++
(http://www2.math.uni-wuppertal.de/~xsc/software/filib.html http://www2.math.uni-wuppertal.de/~xsc/software/filib.html).
I unfortunately have no idea how it performs/how good it is.
By the way, thanks a lot for the Unum reference; seems like it is still in too early a stage for inclusion in the book above.
- delhanty 10y agoFloating point is Nick Higham's thing isn't? I have his book "Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms, Second Edition" http://www.ma.man.ac.uk/~higham/asna/ http://www.ma.man.ac.uk/~higham/asna/ but I haven't got very far with it yet. Maybe the article in the Princeton Companion is a summarized version of his book?
- jacobolus 10y agoI emailed Nick Higham asking about Unums a year and a half ago. Hopefully he doesn’t mind me quoting from private email: > I have Gustafson's book and have read a lot of it. I don't yet know what to make of it. [..] His Unum system is a completely different way of working to floating point, so all I can say is that standard error analysis techniques will probably not be applicable. > The book does not yet seem to have atttracted much attention in the numerical analysis community.