3 ms·
Floats are an excellent choice because they encode the inevitable ambiguity of the world. Instead of true and false we can have true = 1 false = 0
by zero_shift 1y ago
Floats are an excellent choice because they encode the inevitable ambiguity of the world. Instead of true and false we can have
true = 1
false = 0
perhaps = 0.5
- mattkrause 1y agoAnd now you've invented Church (among others)!
- inkyoto 1y agoAddendum: «nevermore == -1» for «no value».
- jodrellblank 1y agoTracking the accumulated 'perhaps'ness... "Essentially, each Ball Arithmetic number carries with it an explicit Radius that describes the interval which contains the true value. Because Ball Arithmetic data propagates throughout a calculation and is never demoted to a lower datatype, its advantage is that after each operation the resulting Ball reliably includes the true answer. Across an entire algorithm, the final result is a Ball that indicates explicitly how precise it is, thus eliminating the guesswork as to the effect on the algorithm of the inexactness of the input and any other inexact constants used" - NARS2000 dialect of APL, Ball / Interval arithmetic: https://wiki.nars2000.org/index.php/Ball_Arithmetic https://wiki.nars2000.org/index.php/Ball_Arithmetic