Unum Computing: An Energy Efficient and Massively Parallel Approach to Numerics

Re:Unum Computing: An Energy Efficient and Massively Paralle... by stephencanon on Friday July 24, 2015 @04:36PM (#9945018)

That's fine, but then you're representing dyadic intervals, not real numbers. Simple question: what's unum[sqrt(2)]?

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Re:Unum Computing: An Energy Efficient and Massively Paralle... by dnautics on Friday July 24, 2015 @05:06PM (#9945190)

Rougly speaking It would be 1.414... + plus a bit that indicates the result is between two adjacent exact values. This bit would not be set if the result were exact.

It's not the same as dyadic interval math, it's kind of a hybrid.

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Re:Unum Computing: An Energy Efficient and Massively Paralle... by davisourus on Friday July 24, 2015 @06:40PM (#9945669)

And you could set the environmental variables to be as precise as you need. If you need 29 digits of precision, you can quickly show that you know 1.4142135623730950488016887242 and nothing more.

A reasonable metaphor would be that you cannot draw all of the Mandelbrot diagram, but you can render any piece of it to any resolution you choose. Being able to describe it precisely, and to know the limits of your accuracy, is useful.

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