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People learn in different ways, but sometimes the establishment fixates on explaining a concept in one way. If that’s not your way you might be out of luck. If you have trouble internalizing floating point number representations, the Internet is your friend. [Fabian Sanglard] (author of Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D) didn’t like the traditional presentation of floating point numbers, so he decided to explain them a different way.
Instead of thinking of an exponent and a mantissa — the traditional terms — [Fabian] calls the exponent as a “window” that determines the range of the number between two powers of two. So the window could be from 1 to 2 or from 1 024 to 2048 or from 32768 to 65536.
Once you’ve determined the window, the mantissa — [Fabian] calls that the offset — divides the window range into 8,388,608 pieces, assuming a 32-bit float. Just like an 8-bit PWM value uses 128 for 50%, the offset (or mantissa) would be 4,194,304 if the value was halfway into the window.
There are a few details glossed over — the bias in the exponent and the assumed digit in the mantissa are in the provided formulas, but the reason for them isn’t as clearly spelled out as it would be for the “classic” explanation. If you want a go at the traditional classroom lecture on the topic, there’s one below.
We’ve talked about floating point representations and their effect on missiles. There was a time when you hated to use floating point because it was so expensive in either dollars or CPU time, but these days even a solder controller can do relatively fast math with floats.
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