Here's a link to the patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US9817662B2/en?oq=No.+9%2c...
Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
161–170 of 205 posts
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is inaccuracy, but the point is that it tracks how much inaccuracy there might be. I picture this as being similar to how computers can't trust time for all sorts of reasons, so Google's Spanner uses time ranges and estimates of potential inaccuracy to make it possible to work with that. It will truncate, so you won't really have 1/3, but you'll know it's approximately 0.333, definitely more than 6/20 but defin…
Yes, this is my exact understanding of the article too. So in that case, "[it] allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit" doesn't really hold true.
I think you're reading it wrong. I think the intended meaning was that it's accurate for real numbers up to, but not including, the final digit"
That's how I read it.
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#163I wrote an interval arithmetic package once too. It was slow, because it had to change the FP rounding flags multiple times for some operations.
In the end, it seemed like any substantial computation ended up having extremely wide bounds, much wider than they deserved. Trying to invert a matrix often resulted in [-Inf .. +Inf] bounds.
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#164This appears to be complete nonsense.
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're living in a fantasy world. You're looking at the status quo: some guy has invented a better floating point circuit, and you think there are two options. 1) The guy releases it to the public for general use, or 2) the guy patents it and holds a monopoly over its use. Obviously 1) is a greater public good than 2), but in reality these are not the only options. Here's some other realistic situations: 3) With no i…
The fantasy world is thinking that plucky little inventors creating something is the status quo. You think big companies like Intel don't have hundreds of people working on research full-time? That they freely lease all fruits of their research out to their competition rather than keeping a 20-year monopoly? Patents, like any monopoly-granting device, benefit market incumbents much more than encourage new entrants
maybe large companies shouldn't be able to own patents.
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I was thinking too; If I do 1 / 3, then of course it will have to truncate, and integration errors would still be inevitable.
Actually it's possible to represent 1/3 perfectly accurately, but what about all the numbers that it's theoretically impossible to compute? (Almost all real numbers have this property)
>Actually it's possible to represent 1/3 perfectly accurately
I'm curious, how?
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patents don't necessarily mean nobody else can use it. For example, he could license the technology which means people have to pay to use it.
And what about programmers that care about free as freedom?
doubt it effects programmers, just chips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually it's possible to represent 1/3 perfectly accurately, but what about all the numbers that it's theoretically impossible to compute? (Almost all real numbers have this property)
>Actually it's possible to represent 1/3 perfectly accurately I'm curious, how?
> I'm curious, how?
As 1/3 - exactly as it's on your screen. All rational numbers can be represented exactly.
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is my exact understanding of the article too. So in that case, "[it] allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit" doesn't really hold true.
I think you're reading it wrong. I think the intended meaning was that it's accurate for real numbers up to, but not including, the final digit" That's how I read it.
Many real numbers have an infinite number of digits
Re: Inventor Claims to Have Solved Floating Point Error Problem
#170Considering the over-the-top language ("a game changer for the computing industry") and questionable or imprecise comments like, "[it] allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit" (um, who reads that without thinking of irrational numbers?) it sounds too much like a sales pitch and not like serious research. I could be wrong, but based on the similarities to interval arithmetic everyone has alrea…
> who reads that without thinking of irrational numbers?
Not directly related to the article, but many [1] irrational numbers (π for example, or sqrt(2)) can be represented in a computer in their entirety, i.e. "accurate to the last digit." Not all digits are stored at once in RAM, of course, but you can obtain an arbitrary digit (given sufficient time). That's precisely how computable numbers are defined (first by Turing in his 1936 paper that first defined the notion of computation, and was called On Computable Numbers, where the "numbers" in the title refer to real numbers, including irrational ones).
[1]: Relative to the irrational numbers that "we know", not to all uncountable ones, of course.