Talk:Floating-point arithmetic/Archive 5

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Archive 5

Zuse's Z3 floating-point format

There are contradictory documents about the size and the significand (mantissa) size of the floating-point format of Zuse's Z3. According to Pr Horst Zuse, this is 22 bits, with a 15-bit significand (implicit bit + 14 represented bits). There has been a recent anonymous change of the article, based on unpublished Raúl Rojas's work, but I wonder whether this is reliable. Raúl Rojas was already wrong in the Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society Number 37, 2006 about single precision (he said 22 bits for the mantissa). Vincent Lefèvre (talk) 14:44, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Error in diagram

The image "Float mantissa exponent.png" erroneously shows that 10e-4 is the exponent, while the exponent actually is only -4 and the base is 10. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.85.65.228 (talk) 12:14, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Failure at Dhahran - Loss of significance or clock drift

This article states in section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Incidents that the Failure at Dhahran was caused by Loss of significance. However, the article "MIM-104 Patriot" makes it sound like it was rather simply clock drift. This should be cleared up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.198.218.209 (talk) 14:01, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree. It isn't a loss of significance as defined by Loss of significance. It is an accumulation of rounding errors (not compensating each other) due to the fact that 1/10 was represented in binary (with a low precision for its usage). In a loss of significance, the relative error increases while the absolute error remains (almost) the same. Here, it is the opposite: the relative error remains (almost) the same, but the absolute error (which is what matters here) increases. Vincent Lefèvre (talk) 00:49, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

John McLaughlin's Album

Should there be a link to John McLaughlin's album at the top in case someone was trying to go there but went here?2602:306:C591:4D0:AD55:E334:4141:98FA (talk) 05:49, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Done. Good catch! --Guy Macon (talk) 07:05, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

needs simpler overview

put it this way, I'm an IT guy and I can't understand this article, there need to be a much simpler summery for non tech people, using simple English. Right now every other word is another tech term I don't fully understand. -- thanks, Wikipedia Lover & Supporter

It seems that Mfwitten removed that simple overview. Perhaps, to enforce the WP:ROWN. He called this "streamlining". I have recovered mine affair, additionally reducing the 'bits part'. Yet, I am sure, IT department will be happy now. --Javalenok (talk) 18:56, 17 February 2015 (UTC)