Beating Floating Point at its Own Game: Posit Arithmetic

Download the paper: http://www.johngustafson.net/pdfs/BeatingFloatingPoint.pdf

John Gustafson created "unums," short for "universal numbers," as an alternative to the IEEE 754 floating point standard our computers have used for decades. IEEE 754 is efficient to implement in hardware and often accurate enough, but in some situations it can also give very incorrect results. With type-3 unums, also known as "posits" and "valids," the author thinks he can do better.

David Sullins will describe how posits work and show some pretty charts comparing them to traditional floating point numbers. The talk will begin with a brief introduction to IEEE 754 floating point numbers to give you a point of comparison to help in understanding the paper.

Asynchrony Labs will be sponsoring our food, many thanks to them!