Shared this because I was having fun thinking through floating point numbers the other day.

I worked through what fp6 (e3m2) would look like, doing manual additions and multiplications, showing cases where the operations are non-associative, etc. and then I wanted something more rigorous to read.

For anyone interested in floating point numbers, I highly recommend working through fp6 as an activity! Felt like I truly came away with a much deeper understanding of floats. Anything less than fp6 felt too simple/constrained, and anything more than fp6 felt like too much to write out by hand. For fp6 you can enumerate all 64 possible values on a small sheet of paper.

For anyone not (yet) interested in floating point numbers, I’d still recommend giving it a shot.