Unum: Time to Hack the Floats
Floating-point arithmetic came about over a hundred years ago in 1914 during the time of World War I. While it has been patched up many times throughout the century it still holds many fundamental disadvantages that come from its property.
The mathematician Dr. John Gustafson has 42 years experience using and designing compute-intensive systems and he realised the need of a new number format system that could address real-world problems that come with floating-point maths. He invented Unum in early 2016 with practicality and scalability in his mind based on his own experience dealing issues with floats. There has been a number of attempts to outperform floating-point arithmetic in the past; but Unum is the best one both mathematically and practically. He really has hacked the floats.
The talk is going to be about introducing Unum which is a number format for the future, that could potentially wipe out the conventional floating-point numbers used in all our computers. Unum is simply put, a bit representation of a real number where the precision control is given to the user.
The talk will include:
- Background on floating-point numbers and its errors
- Comparison between Unum vs floats
- Introduction of Unum 2.0
- Unum 2.0 arithmetic
- Drawbacks and challenges Unum is facing
| Min Kweon | The University of Queensland |  |
Min is an undergraduate student majoring software engineering at the University of Queensland. Min has participated in a number of start-up activities and hackathon event, and is currently looking for an internship/vacation program to find out what it's like to work for a large enterprise.
He was fortunate enough to meet Dr. John Gustafson, the inventor of Unum, as a student in his class during an exchange semester at National University of Singapore. Min quickly grew fond of Unum, as he witnessed being showcased in a tech conference by his own professor. As with any disruptive innovation, Unum is facing a lot of hate from some individuals who don’t like to evolve. To overcome that, Unum needs to be known to more people in the world and Min volunteered to help spread the word!