alt Hacker NewsAre you certain that applies here? The length of the intermediate numbers grows superpolynomially, so you would be sure to overflow fixed width numbers. Floats are not a field.
Are you certain that applies here? The length of the intermediate numbers grows superpolynomially, so you would be sure to overflow fixed width numbers. Floats are not a field.
Yes, floats are not a field, which is why you don't use floating point except to convert to and from a different representation. Overflow is expected and cancels out as long as the final result is uniquely representable. See the paper I linked, which implements 64-bit floating point matrix multiplication using 8-bit numbers with wrapping overflow modulo a set of small coprime integers. The result is reconstructed at the end using the Chinese Remainder Theorem.