Probably Dance

For the second time in my career, I ran into a problem where it’s actually useful to know how floating point numbers work. (first time was here) The problem is that sometimes you want floating point numbers that add well. So that you have the associativity guarantee that (a + b) + c == a + (b + c).

The use case here was for A* path finding, but this may also be applicable in other situations. I’ll explain a bit more of A* later, but as a motivation you just have to know that you can speed up A* a lot if you can reason about all the nodes in your graph that have the same “cost.” But since the “cost” is a sum of a lot of different floats, they will rarely have exactly the same value. At that point you could fudge numbers and say that “if two numbers are equal to within 0.0001, treat them as equal” but when you do that it’s easy to accidentally define an ordering that’s not a strict weak ordering. And I have literally seen a crash caused by an incorrect float ordering that was very rare and very hard to track down. So once bitten twice shy, I wanted to see if I couldn’t just force floating math to be exact. And turns out you often can.

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