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Considering the over-the-top language ("a game changer for the computing industry") and questionable or imprecise comments like, "[it] allows representation of
by agar 9y ago
Considering the over-the-top language ("a game changer for the computing industry") and questionable or imprecise comments like, "[it] allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit" (um, who reads that without thinking of irrational numbers?) it sounds too much like a sales pitch and not like serious research.
I could be wrong, but based on the similarities to interval arithmetic everyone has already identified, I'm pretty skeptical. At best, this could be a patent on a more efficient way to build interval arithmetic into a CPU architecture rather than a completely new technique.
As my British friends would say though, I can't be arsed to actually read the patent.
- nraynaud 9y agoit's a journalist writing the article, they want clickbait.
- iiv 9y agoThe journalist quoted the "inventor".
- TallGuyShort 9y agoOr a PR person was involved. I've been quoted in press releases saying stuff I never said, and it's par for the course, apparently.
- nraynaud 9y agoyou are right, I went to read the PR after commenting, it's cringy.
- matt4077 9y agoHow can it be "clickbait" if it's in the article? What am I supposed to click on? Moreover, these are clearly marked quotes from the press release and the patent. Maybe this technology doesn't merit an article. But if it does, quoting the inventor is exactly what one expect from coverage. Note that it does invite scepticism, starting with "claims" in the headline. This gratuitous hatred of journalism is seriously getting out of hands.
- ryanianian 9y ago"clickbait" ~~ overboard sensationalism for the purposes of getting more attention than demure/traditional language would get. Even though it's in the article, this kind of language can be added by journalists to incentivize non-expert editors/publishers to publish their work versus others.
- frogpelt 9y agoI agree with you. But there's more "clickbait" online than actual journalism. The saturation point has been reached for a lot of people and it's difficult for them to go back to respecting actual journalism or even distinguishing between the two.
- tombert 9y agoThat's what I was thinking too; If I do 1 / 3, then of course it will have to truncate, and integration errors would still be inevitable.
- TallGuyShort 9y agoThere is inaccuracy, but the point is that it tracks how much inaccuracy there might be. I picture this as being similar to how computers can't trust time for all sorts of reasons, so Google's Spanner uses time ranges and estimates of potential inaccuracy to make it possible to work with that. It will truncate, so you won't really have 1/3, but you'll know it's approximately 0.333, definitely more than 6/20 but definitely less than 7/20, for instance, and if you ever exceed certain bounds of certainty the calculation and all resulting calculations are flagged as not being that trustable. As is my understanding from the article, anyway.
- koonsolo 9y agoYes, this is my exact understanding of the article too. So in that case, "[it] allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit" doesn't really hold true.
- BFatts 9y agoI think you're reading it wrong. I think the intended meaning was that it's accurate for real numbers up to, but not including, the final digit" That's how I read it.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoMany real numbers have an infinite number of digits
- LASR 9y agoI think you're missing the point. Using the example above. 1/3 has no final digit. 0.333333 repeating infinitely. So how do you then store this number to the final digit or final -1 digit using this mechanism?
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoBriefly read, it looks like an idea and not an 'apparatus'. Yes, carrying error bound information along with the number is interesting. How is that implemented in real time? How is accumulated error calculated (how do we know the floating values we are calculating with are not perfectly precise e.g. 3.0000... and not 3.000...1)?
- eeks 9y ago> Briefly read, it looks like an idea and not an 'apparatus'. It's patent law lingo. The patent covers both the idea (the "system") and subsequent implementations (the "apparatus") that are direct implementations of the idea.
- pps43 9y agoThat's easy, always round down and also carry max possible error (calculated by rounding up and subtracting the rounded down value). For example, 1/3 can be represented as 0.333 with error 0.001. Multiply it by 3 and get 0.999 with error 0.003. You won't need many bits for the error, and operations can be made reasonably fast as only several lowest bits are affected.
- meuk 9y agoAgreed. After reading the abstract, the method seems like a reasonable method to implement interval arithmetic. However, I haven't discovered any novel idea in it.
- odammit 9y agoI’m willing to wager it’s regular old floating point and it just draws the repeating bar over the repeating decimals.
- pron 9y ago> who reads that without thinking of irrational numbers? Not directly related to the article, but many [1] irrational numbers (π for example, or sqrt(2)) can be represented in a computer in their entirety, i.e. "accurate to the last digit." Not all digits are stored at once in RAM, of course, but you can obtain an arbitrary digit (given sufficient time). That's precisely how computable numbers are defined (first by Turing in his 1936 paper that first defined the notion of computation, and was called On Computable Numbers, where the "numbers" in the title refer to real numbers, including irrational ones). [1]: Relative to the irrational numbers that "we know", not to all uncountable ones, of course.