4 ms·
That's hilarious. It's like slicing off the top 0.0001% of mt. Everest and saying that you have evenly split the world.
by jacquesm 8mo ago
That's hilarious.
It's like slicing off the top 0.0001% of mt. Everest and saying that you have evenly split the world.
- adampunk 8mo agoIt gets WORSE. Here's a quote from “The Birth of a Computer” in BYTE Magazine, February 1985, an interview with J.H. Wilkinson, noted numerical slouch, on the Manchester machines ca 1949 (p. 178): >They were fixed point, but one of the earliest things that I did (at Turing’s request) was to program a set of subroutines for doing floating-point arithmetic. So we ought to scale to better ourselves with self-study, meanwhile one of the first errands TURING send WILKINSON on was to rid themselves of this duty. ;)
- jacquesm 8mo agoThe 'numerical slouch' bit had me in stitches. It's interesting how many of these things we take for granted. I'm working (and have been for a while) on something that requires both ridiculous precision and speed on a relatively puny power budget and it's been a really nice trip down memory lane regarding optimization. I discovered fixed point pretty early in my programming career when doing 3D graphics on the 6502. I never imagined that that knowledge would come in handy more than almost five decades later, but here we are.