3 ms·

The paper for this was published in 2017[0] [0] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3148220 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3148220

agumonkey 7y ago
It's odd. Someone told me about that on irc at the Time. People were feeling strongly about the topic. Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards.
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  Lots and lots of people have proposed replacements for IEEE floats that fix (or claim to fix) various problems with floats. 90% of them are utter nonsense, so many people default to assuming that any new one they encounter is also utter nonsense, and they usually turn out to be right.
- bsder 7y ago
  > Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards. Mostly because there is no good evidence that what is being proposed is better. This isn't the olden days when it was difficult to demonstrate on a large enough CPU and dataset. Today we have cloud computing. If you create something better, you can demonstrate it by putting it into a numerics application and blow everybody away. The CFD people are always looking for better solutions. The numerical simulation people are always constrained. Until you do that, people have a right to blow you off.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Mostly because there is no good evidence that what is being proposed is better. Err, it's math, there doesn't need to be "evidence". They can do the calculations for themselves and see...
    - bsder 7y ago
      It's not my job to prove your assertion. If you want me to believe something, the jobs is yours to cough up the convincing evidence.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    This paper on UK weather simulation, cited in the article, seems like pretty good evidence: https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13/1100-MilanKlower.pdf https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13/1100-MilanKlower.pdf
    - bsder 7y ago
      That only really compares posits to Float16 in a domain where the paper admits roundoff error mostly isn't really an issue even at single precision. I'd be much more interested to see how these handle stiff systems with multiple time constants. That's a domain where everything has problems and improvement is going to actually move some things from completely infeasible to actually simulatable. That's a much stronger use case. And you don't have to worry about implementation efficiency since the improvement ratio is "infinity"--you went from can't do it at all to actually being able to do it.

agumonkey 7y ago

It's odd. Someone told me about that on irc at the Time. People were feeling strongly about the topic. Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards.

plorkyeran 7y ago
Lots and lots of people have proposed replacements for IEEE floats that fix (or claim to fix) various problems with floats. 90% of them are utter nonsense, so many people default to assuming that any new one they encounter is also utter nonsense, and they usually turn out to be right.
bsder 7y ago
> Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards. Mostly because there is no good evidence that what is being proposed is better. This isn't the olden days when it was difficult to demonstrate on a large enough CPU and dataset. Today we have cloud computing. If you create something better, you can demonstrate it by putting it into a numerics application and blow everybody away. The CFD people are always looking for better solutions. The numerical simulation people are always constrained. Until you do that, people have a right to blow you off.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Mostly because there is no good evidence that what is being proposed is better. Err, it's math, there doesn't need to be "evidence". They can do the calculations for themselves and see...
  - bsder 7y ago
    It's not my job to prove your assertion. If you want me to believe something, the jobs is yours to cough up the convincing evidence.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  This paper on UK weather simulation, cited in the article, seems like pretty good evidence: https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13/1100-MilanKlower.pdf https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13/1100-MilanKlower.pdf
  - bsder 7y ago
    That only really compares posits to Float16 in a domain where the paper admits roundoff error mostly isn't really an issue even at single precision. I'd be much more interested to see how these handle stiff systems with multiple time constants. That's a domain where everything has problems and improvement is going to actually move some things from completely infeasible to actually simulatable. That's a much stronger use case. And you don't have to worry about implementation efficiency since the improvement ratio is "infinity"--you went from can't do it at all to actually being able to do it.