Its probably worth emphasising that the recursion you need to "construct" the Surreals is infinite, in other words this does not give a reasonable algorithm to (for example) add two real numbers, you need S_omega in order to have even all rational numbers.

The construction is rather involved but if we're only interested in the reals for now you can think of it as defining a real number by a set of rational numbers, in particular define a particular "real number" to be the set of all rational numbers less than it, for example sqrt(2) is defined to be the set of all rationals p/q such that p^2/q^2 < 2. We can "recursively" define addition of these real numbers in terms of addition of rational numbers because to add two reals you "just" have to add all the rationals in their respective sets.

In general there is no sensible algorithm to do anything in the real numbers, since most real numbers aren't even computable (there is no way to represent an arbitrary real number on a Turing machine).

Of course, once you decide to iterate over uncountable sets, infinity starts to appear all the time.

This isn't the only case of infinite calculations that can't be computed in practice but that mathematics use all the time anyway; and it reflects quite well the fact that multiplying irrational numbers isn't something that one can do practice. There is no problem with it.

Multiplying algebraics is trivial. A rectangle with sides sqrt(3) and sqrt(2) has area sqrt(6), which can be approximated by a decimal if needed.

There are countable/computable/constructable subsets of the reals where multiplication has a finite algorithm and is it repeated addition.

One example is the algebraics, as well as extensions the including a few special constants like pi. These are the subsets of the reals most commonly used for math and science. So in a wide range of problems areas, multiplication is not just repeated addition.

I definitely wasn't trying to indicate that there was a problem with this, just pointing out that the path of using the Surreals (or anything else) to give an "algorithmic" description of real addition or multiplication is probably a bad idea.

I wasn't even attempting to give an "algorithmic" description. Just a formulaic one, that depends on the axiom of infinity (and accepting transfinite induction as a valid process). Since even at least one of the usual process for constructing the Reals (Dedekind cuts) needs this I don't feel it's much of a stretch in reasoning. And the Surreals have a nicer recursive formula for multiplication that eventually turns into repeated sums, and they're a strict superset of the Reals, so it does apply there.

If you want an algorithmic (no possible need an infinite number of steps) explicit construction of anything on the Reals you're going to be disappointed. They're an infinite set.

You can get algorithmic explicit constructions of (for example) integer addition, rational addition and multiplication and even addition and multiplication of algebraic numbers on a Turing machine (all algebraic numbers are computable). All of these sets are infinite. The reals are particularly "badly behaved" even as far as infinite sets go.