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In the article they mention that log functions make some multiplication problems much faster for humans to solve. Can they also make it faster for computers to
by rotten 13y ago
In the article they mention that log functions make some multiplication problems much faster for humans to solve. Can they also make it faster for computers to solve?
In other words, if I'm writing a program (perhaps for data analysis) that has to do a large amount of multiplication, can I get the answers faster by converting them to log and then adding them, and then reverse look up the result?
Or, are addition and multiplication equally fast on most computers so that the time to look up log values would always be slower?
- temujin 13y agoFloating-point multiplication generally isn't much slower than addition on modern machines. Logs are useful for avoiding floating point overflow/underflow, though.