Comment by adamjs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamjs | Hacker News Reader

The OP copied only half my tweet, full title should be "...to minimize floating-point precision errors". This tool is specifically for improving the numerical accuracy of equations when translated into floating-point code-- "minimizing errors" makes no sense without the qualifiers.

I do a lot of procedural graphics on the GPU and am constantly plagued by precision issues (you cannot copy equations verbatim into code, you must observe overflow/underflow and other numerical issues). Herbie is pretty magical in that it can _automatically_ translate math expressions into a form that's friendlier for computers.

Also the reason why the GitHub site source was linked is because the website [1] crashed under traffic earlier today (full site contains an interactive solver and examples).

[1] http://herbie.uwplse.org/

Do you have an example of a graphics algorithm that you were helped with by this tool / a description of how that went?

There's actually a great write-up on how Herbie was used in the real-world to fix and improve math.js: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/casio-mathjs.html

I've personally used it for improving some distance-field approximation code on the GPU (made it easier to translate the math into numerically-stable code).

Adam, I'm one of the authors of Herbie. I'd love to hear about the distance-field approximation code you improved using Herbie. Is there any chance you can email me some details? You can use my personal email (on my profile) or the herbie@cs.washington.edu mailing list.

Ok, we changed the title from "Herbie: A tool to automatically rewrite arithmetic expressions to minimize error" to be closer to what you've said here. If anyone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

Wouldn't it need to know the probable value ranges of the input variables?

I think it would be interesting if something like this could be chosen as a compiler optimization.

It can if you use Haskell: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/HerbiePlugin

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