Hello all, The next MaPSS talk of this semester will be at 17:00 on Mon 15th October in Carslaw 535. It’s a great opportunity to meet fellow postgrads, listen to an interesting talk, and of course get free food! ************************************************************************************** Speaker: Jonathon Tidswell Title: An Introduction to Monte-Carlo Arithmetic (aka Floating Point Arithmetic) Abstract: Monte-Carlo Arithmetic (MCA) was introduced in 1997 as a probabilistic extension of Floating Point Arithmetic (FP) to recover standard properties of arithmetic (esp. associativity). Since 2011 its been used in three separate computer engineering projects as a probabilistic numerical analysis technique. However, it has failed to gain any appreciable foothold despite the nominal elegance of the approach. In this talk I will introduce/review traditional (IEEE) Floating Point Arithmetic to consider a simple example (from published literature) of Monte-Carlo Arithmetic. Using this example I will identify two theoretical issues and my (current) plans for addressing them. Time (and audience) permitting I will briefly outline some work to (marginally) improve calculation of trigonometric functions based on a chance discovery earlier this year (using the same properties of floating point arithmetic). ************************************************************************************** See you there! Details can also be found on the school’s new Postgraduate Society website: http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/MaPS/mapss.html Cheers, Alex