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Computers are inherently imprecise? Floating point is imprecise, yeah lets generalize that to the entire computer..

Float operations are actually precise, the catch is that floats are not real real numbers.

Is there any part of a computer that could actually be considered imprecise? Perhaps only if there is a hardware malfunction.

You could argue that float/int arithmetic is inherently imprecise. It is, however, fully deterministic.

Of course as you hint in your comment, at a lower level hardware is prone to failures and lack determinism: bugs in the cpu, ram corruption (ECC-ram is of course better), data corruption everywhere on storage/network/data links, etc. Ever heard a gamer bitching about Windows 7 instability? That's not Windows, but overclocking not quite under control and/or insufficient cooling...

And when all is under control a cosmic ray might still wreak your bits havoc.

It's deterministic at some level, but can be very difficult to predict when a compiler will decide to spill 80-bit float registers to 64-bit doubles in memory.

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