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cousin_it comments on The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy - Less Wrong
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Do you think some constructivist representation of numbers can do better than IEEE floats at removing the need for numerical analysis in most engineering tasks, while still staying fast enough? I'm veeeeery skeptical. It would be a huge breakthrough if it were true.
Yes, that's my position. In fact, if you had hardware support for an intuitionistic / constructivist representation (intervals, perhaps), my bet would be that the circuits would be simpler than the floating-point hardware implementing the IEEE standard now.
I'm not an expert in the field, but it seems to me that intervals require strictly more complexity than IEEE floats (because you still need to do floating-point arithmetic on the endpoints) and will be unusable in many practical problems because they will get too wide. At least that's the impression I got from reading a lot of Kahan. Or do you have some more clever scheme in mind?
Yes, if you have to embrace the same messy compromises, then I am mistaken. My belief (which is founded on studying logic and mathematics in college, and then software development after college) is that better foundations, with effort, show through to better implementations.