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1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jul-2019 20:45:22 EDT Nate Cull

   ok I think I have maybe reached a new low of nerdism, but,

   John Gustafson's 'posits' floating point format is a thing of beauty and I am in awe

   the bits! they align!

   also, exponents of exponents of exponents

   when your numbers aren't quite numbery enough? MOAR EXPONENTS is definitely what you need.

   https://posithub.org/docs/Posits4.pdf

   via https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/07/08/new-approach-could-sink-floating-point-computation/

   via @enkiv2

   1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jul-2019 20:52:19 EDT Nate Cull

      in reply to

      but I mean tell me this isn't beautiful

      One 'complex infinity' number which also counts as 'not a number', but is a perfectly good number (pretty much exactly James Anderson's 'nullity'... just without also the other two infinities). No overflow or underflow states; numbers just stick at MINPOS and MAXPOS (and, I assume -MINPOS and -MAXPOS) (minimum/maximum possible) rather than zero or infinities.

      That last diagram is 7 bits getting you a million times dynamic range (+- 1/1024 to +- 1024/1)