3 ms·
Calculating the heat death of the universe down to the nanosecond are we? (i mean this is a legitimate reason, it's just amusing the extremes you'd have to go
by AnotherGoodName 6y ago
Calculating the heat death of the universe down to the nanosecond are we?
(i mean this is a legitimate reason, it's just amusing the extremes you'd have to go to to break 64bits).
- pavon 6y agoI know it is a joke, but 64bit fixed-point representation with nanosecond resolution has just ~585 years of range. With 1e100 years of range needed to measure out to the heat-death of the universe, you end up with resolution of ~5e80 years, which is 60 orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe. It is easy to run out of bits when trying to use a single number as both an absolute date/time, and to compute relative durations between timestamps with reasonable precision. I've lost track of the number of bugs I've fixed where someone assumed a double would be big enough without doing the math.
- 3JPLW 6y agoHunh? January 1, 1970 + 9.007199254740992e15 nanoseconds gets you all the way to... tax day[1]. Microseconds gets you to the year 2255; milliseconds to heat death. 1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=January+1%2C+1970+%2B+9.007199254740992e15+nanoseconds https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=January+1%2C+1970+%2B+...
- pavon 6y agoQwibble: Microseconds gets you to the year 2540 with double precision, because the implied 1-bit means you effectively have 54-bit mantissa.