Re: Well DUH ! AI People Finally Realize They Can Ditch Most Floating-Point for Big Ints

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 02:43:08 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>

   The question is how EXACT the precision HAS to be for most "AI" uses.
   Might be safe to throw away a few decimal points at the bottom.

>
It's usually referred to as 'machine learning' rather than AI but when you
look at TinyML on edge devices doing image recognition, wake word
processing, and other tasks it's impressive how much you can throw away
and still get a reasonable quality of results.
>
https://www.tinyml.org/
>
This goes back to the slide rule days. Sure, you could whip out your book
of six place tables and get seemingly more accurate results but did all
those decimal places mean anything in the real world? Computers took the
pain out of calculations but also tended to avoid the questions of 'what
does this really mean in the real world'.

In high school chemistry, we learned how to apply uncertainty ranges (plus or
minus) to measurements and how to accumulate ranges based on multiple
measurements.

The political polls state ranges, but nothing about the alpha, the N, and,
most importantly, the wording of the poll questions and the nature of the
sampling.

--
It was the Law of the Sea, they said.  Civilization ends at the waterline.
Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
-- Hunter S. Thompson