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Herbie: Automatically rewrites expressions to minimize floating point error

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Re: Herbie: Automatically rewrites expressions to minimize floating point error

#21

Post by _0ffh » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 12:46 PM UTC

adamjs wrote: post #14

The OP copied only half my tweet, full title should be "...to minimize floating-point precision errors". This tool is specifically for improving the numerical accuracy of equations when translated into floating-point code-- "minimizing errors" makes no sense without the qualifiers. I do a lot of procedural graphics on the GPU and am constantly plagued by precision issues (you cannot copy equations verbatim into code,…

Wouldn't it need to know the probable value ranges of the input variables?

Re: Herbie: Automatically rewrites expressions to minimize floating point error

#22

Post by pavpanchekha » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 4:23 PM UTC

adamjs wrote: post #17

jacobolus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of a graphics algorithm that you were helped with by this tool / a description of how that went?

There's actually a great write-up on how Herbie was used in the real-world to fix and improve math.js: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/casio-mathjs.html I've personally used it for improving some distance-field approximation code on the GPU (made it easier to translate the math into numerically-stable code).

Adam, I'm one of the authors of Herbie. I'd love to hear about the distance-field approximation code you improved using Herbie. Is there any chance you can email me some details? You can use my personal email (on my profile) or the herbie@cs.washington.edu mailing list.

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