Universal Coding of the Reals: Alternatives to IEEE Floating Point

Peter Lindstrom from LLNL gave this talk at the Conference on Next Generation Arithmetic in Singapore. “We propose a modular framework for representing the real numbers that generalizes IEEE, POSITS, and related floating-point number systems, and which has its roots in universal codes for the positive integers such as the Elias codes. This framework unifies several known but seemingly unrelated representations within a single schema while also introducing new representations.”