"Unit in the last place" floating point test

For about the third time, I have needed to look up how to code the Unit in the last place floating point test so I'm going to post this link so I can find it.

And to protect from that going dead the final code:

// Usable AlmostEqual function
bool AlmostEqual2sComplement(float A, float B, int maxUlps)
{
    // Make sure maxUlps is non-negative and small enough that the
    // default NAN won't compare as equal to anything.
    assert(maxUlps > 0 && maxUlps < 4 * 1024 * 1024);
    int aInt = *(int*)&A;
    // Make aInt lexicographically ordered as a twos-complement int
    if (aInt < 0)
        aInt = 0x80000000 - aInt;
    // Make bInt lexicographically ordered as a twos-complement int
    int bInt = *(int*)&B;
    if (bInt < 0)
        bInt = 0x80000000 - bInt;
    int intDiff = abs(aInt - bInt);
    if (intDiff <= maxUlps)
        return true;
    return false;
}

Some musings on David Weber's world.

A while back I finished off all the available Honor Harrington books. The last one has a foreword that mentions that there are already two more books fully written and in the pipe. So having a mind that just will not shut down, I started pondering what will happen. It doesn’t help that their author, David Weber, finally dropped a cliff hanger on his fans. Any way I realized that I’m in an interesting position; I have a theory as to where the next books are going and they are already fixed so I can’t influence them. So what I’m going to do is throw my speculation out here on my blog and in a few months when the books come out see how it matches. If it does, well cool. If not, it’s kind of fun anyway.

For starters, I have no special knowledge of Mr. Weber’s plans. All I know is what I have read in his books and a little on-line research. (So Mr. Weber, if I get this all spot on, don’t sue me or you will validate it). All of this is based on speculation and the two rules of good story telling:

1. The story must be reasonable and believable.
   
2. The story must be entertaining (or addictive)
   

It wouldn’t be believable for Manticore to come out to easily (and with no peril it wouldn't be fun either) and watching you team get utterly crushed would drive the fans away (and coming back from that wouldn’t be believable either) so it will be somewhere in between. Also that leads to some very fun sub plots that can come in.

Last we saw, the Sollies were about to hit Lynx like a ton of bricks on a hard floor and Mesa was about to drop a pile of pods in on Manticore. On a side note, I’m a bit surprised Weber didn’t bring out that option earlier. He could have had 8^th fleet drift in a few pods or mistletoes while the destroyer/scout/decoys were playing their shell games in various Haven system. It sure would have resulted in some funky head games not to mention cost the Peeps dearly in Moriarties and trained crews. Anyway the question is what happens next. Here’s my theories:

The first interesting thing (and more or less a given) is when the Sollies attack the Lynx terminus. As with the ton-o-brick vs. floor, the floor wins. To counter it Honor and 8th fleet is sent through to Talbott putting a substation portion of the Apollo equipped ships and their auxiliaries in Lynx. While they are out of position (leaving, gone or on the way back; I'm not sure where Weber will put them), the Oyster Bay ballistic pods attack, and severely damage most of the Manticore yards and many of home fleet ships that didn't go to Lynx. I can't spot how it could be worked in but I it would be handy if the yard tech crews get out somehow (massed builders trials might do it but that seems a bit clumsy).

As a result of the fleets being out of position at home, Oyster Bay is blunted to some extent but still hurts Manticore a lot. Somewhere in all this, the Mesa spider drive ships attack. The partial failure of the ballistics component cause a less than complete success by the manned elements. As to what happens to the Mesa units, I’m inclined to go with them taking a royal beating including most of the units getting capture or more likely, destroyed. I’m, not sure which book that will happen in because it doesn't fit in the mold that seems to be set up for Torch of Freedom but Missions of Honor comes out second and it would play better if the reader doesn’t get a preview.

One Bit that would have to be in Torch of Freedom is whatever Zilwicki and Cachat have been up to. (I’m really glad Mr. Weber let Mr. Flint play with his toys, those two characters are some of the most enjoyable I have come across (in any storyline) and, based on the Storm from the Shadows foreword, they may have, in real life, saved Honor’s life) It doesn't take much guess work to figure out that they are going to be infiltrating Meas. What I suspect the upshot of that will be, is they learn of Oyster Bay, Mesa's other plans and both the spider and streak drives. They won't get the full story as it seems Mesa's plans are going to be parceled out over a few books at the least. On the other hand, the tech stuff is going to come out soon enough anyway so they will capture documentation, hardware or complete examples of a spider drive. At a minimum, they will get enough to, probably with a little magic on Hemphill's part (or Foraker's, keep reading ;-), figure out how to detect the spider drive. The first real question mark is the streak drive. Henke and the rest of the Talbott crowd is starting to twig to the fact that the "Mesan's mail is running a bit faster than every one else's" so I suspect that will come out also. It would fit their swashbuckling ways for Zilwicki and Cachat to capture a functional Mesa streak drive courier ship and make a run in it for Manticore via Lynx. The next question mark is the timing. They can't arrive to soon or the ship yards could be saved, but to late and it looses some dramatic/tragic weight. I'm going to guess they will show up in time to do some good regarding the manned units or just after the dust settles. (The other option is in time to save the yard dogs but not the yards them selves. For that to work the pods need to be really hard to spot or a pattern of nukes could soft kill them even with lousy target locks).

Now this is getting really speculative, but if Torch of Freedom ends with Zilwicki and Cachat on the way from Mesa to Manticore that would solve the problem of springing Oyster Bay without a preview.

Anyway As for the aftermath in Manticore; Elizabeth, with information from Zilwicki & Cachat, a Manty/Solly war looming and devastated ship yards, will do the "I still hate the Peeps but I need to ignore that" bit and make an abrupt command decision to send Honor directly (and uninvited) to Haven to offer not only peace but an alliance. Honor arrives with a very small task force (on the order of a single Apollo wall’er and a few screen ships to make sure they get Havens attention) as a pointed reminder that Manticore can still hurt them but isn't. Honor does here usual thing of steamrolling her way into what she wants by, with impeccable manors, assuming that she will get it. In this case, what she gets is immediate talks (as in least time to Haven orbit and "meet me at the shuttle pad" immediate) face to face with Pritchart. After hearing what Honor (and maybe Cachat) has to say Pritchart jumps in on the spot.

In a nice political whiplash, Haven sends units to help protect Manticore (some joyfully hated people all but die of indignation at this). In the other direction (and to the great displeasure of a few Havenites) Manticore sends tech crews displaced from the Manticore yards to Bolthole along with the Zilwicki and Cachat's finds. This would lay the ground work for a few threads like getting Hemphill and Foraker working together and the fun, technological and sociological, they could create. (I just realized, I don't think we have ever actually met Hemphill.)

That's about as far as I’m willing to lay out details but I'm actually more comfortable with the big picture further down the line than the details in close. The Mantcore/Haven alliance has two problems. First the Sollies want to pound Manticore and will be running scared when they notice that the only advantage they have left is quantity. The other is whatever Mesa is up to. As the old truisms goes; one problem, is one problem, but two problems, can be two solutions. In line with that, they begin attempting to use Mesa’s operations to turn groups of Sollies away from war. Some sectors immediately jump on board or get out of the way and others get caught in a meat grinder when Mesa plays hard ball. Other sectors governments are clearly to invested and will have to be removed by force. Some of them will fall to Mesa, others to Manticore and Haven. Either way the Sollies fracture along the lines of what Honor outlined in Storm From the Shadows. As for Mesa, the less than total success of Oyster Bay and the Zilwicki/Cachat debacle puts them in a bit of a bind but they invoke the "no plain survives contact with the enemy" line and continue on with a nice show of operational agility, pragmatism and determination.

Now that I look at all of that, I'm think I've covered both the books in the pipe and started in on the next one on the main line. So who knows, some of this might effect the story after all.

This seems a bit "off" to me.

I'm haven't dug into this at all but something is not right here:

FBI Defends Disruptive Raids on Texas Data Centers

The up shot of it is that the FBI raided a few data co-location centers based on a fraud claim by AT&T and Verizon (basically unpaid bills for accounts that my have been set up with falsified information) and walked out with hundreds of servers who's only crime might well be that they were in the same co-location building a servers used for a crime... maybe.

If this was a Hollywood drama/comedy I can just imagine the ending:

FBI spokesman, a year or so down the line: We'er sorry about putting those businesses into bankruptcy by taking there servers because we couldn't tell tell they weren't owned by the bad guys we were after and didn't bother listening to the site manger when he told us exactly that.

I don't think it will be that bad but I'm sure someone should feel ashamed of how they ran this little operation.

Another DSL*.NET language idea

I just came across this post and it made me think of yet another language I would want in a DSL*.NET system: A secure language. That would be a language (probably a scripting type language and a set of them to boot) that are intentionally crippled so that my program can safely run them without having to set up sandboxes.

To follow Mr. Haack's example, a language that is flexible enough to construct a DOM but can't do much else would be rather doable by something like dropping parts of the using semantics so that the code can only interact with objects passed into it and with statics that it defines.

It's not a finished and polished idea but you can see where I'm going with it.

The problem with being overly literal minded.

A number of time I can recall saying (or typing) something and then noting that while what I actually said is exactly what I meant, most people will read between the lines and get something else out of it that is not what I meant. The first example of this I can think of is years ago, asking my dad "Do you know where the whatever is?" Now when he (or most anyone, including my self once in a while) asked that sort of question he would expect people to if they could, help him look for whatever it was he was looking for. The problem was I was asking "Do you know where it is" and exactly nothing more, in fact in that cases asking more would have been rude.

I have run into the same sort of thing a few other places where I ask one question that usually is an implicit request for something else but in a situation where that something else would be rude to ask for. A more recent example would be asking a question on a forum where I could Goggle for the answer in about five minuets. Asking someone to go do my research for me would clearly be rude but what about a question that someone who knows the topic could answer in 15 seconds? I sort of end up stuck in this corner; do I burn five minutes on Goggle trying to find what terms to ask for? Or do I risk sounding rude and selfish on the (fairly good) chance that someone who knows the answer will help me out?

What I often end up doing is spending about half my words explaining what I'm not asking for and it always comes out awkward. I think the whole problem for me comes because (I think) I tend to form loose concept associations. There's the idea of what I want to ask, and the words I use to ask it and because I get the first fully formed before I start in on the second, the implications of the phrase I end up wanting to use don't enter in the decision of whether to ask the question at all.

I'm not trying to change the world (I can't) and I'm not expecting the world to treat me different (it won't) and I'm not even asserting I'm smarter than other people (that's a sort of useless topic to begin with in my book). It's just an interesting thought I had at a way I keep getting tripped up.

The advantages of O(b^d)

The punch line is that the advantages of exponential time complexity is that even small improvements in performance are not so small.

For instance; When I finely got the alpha-beta pruning correct (I think) on my Connect 4 AI and it's effective complexity went from O(7^{0.7 d}) to O(7^{0.6 d}). For d = 13 that's 49 million leafs to 3 million leafs.

This is the same principle that make this idea reasonable