I just want to point out one of the links on that page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_r

I just want to point out one of the links on that page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root Absolutely hilarious and amazingly magical method of algorithmically computing square roots. It right shifts a floating point number to essentially divide the exponent component by 2. Then it uses a weird magic number trick to get the correct result. Awesome random programming trivia.