3 ms·
What's that? Floating point math strikes again? /s Let's build something better.
by inetknght 8y ago
What's that? Floating point math strikes again? /s
Let's build something better.
- stealthcat 8y agoNeed many years ahead for IEEE interval arithmetic hardware implementations to be usable... https://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/1788-2015.html https://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/1788-2015.html
- bsder 8y agoIntervals in interval arithmetic can rapidly go to infinity even when the problem is relatively well behaved (in matrix inversion, for example) and standard floating point arithmetic produces a useful answer.
- AceJohnny2 8y agoIEEE 754 is one of the rare successes of computer engineering and standardization. Turns out it's just hard to implement continuous math on physical hardware. I'm curious (and a bit skeptical) about any efforts that think they can do better.
- triska 8y agoJohn Gustafson has developed several promising alternatives, such as unums, posits and valids: https://posithub.org/about https://posithub.org/about I also recommend his book, The End of Error - Unum Computing: https://www.crcpress.com/The-End-of-Error-Unum-Computing/Gustafson/p/book/9781482239867 https://www.crcpress.com/The-End-of-Error-Unum-Computing/Gus... A transcript of a debate with William Kahan is here: http://www.johngustafson.net/pdfs/DebateTranscription.pdf http://www.johngustafson.net/pdfs/DebateTranscription.pdf
- kccqzy 8y agoWhat better thing do you have in mind? I'm not aware of any general-purpose floating point math replacement that mature enough to be embedded in billions of processors.