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#ieee-754#floating-point#nan

NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS

suckerpinch

202K subscribers • 15 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 8 people: 7 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2025.
  • Presented by Tom Murphy

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

314K views7 years ago8 recommendations

HardwareSystems programmingCPUs and computer architectureElectronicsPerformance and optimization

Tom Murphy presents a humorous yet functional computer architecture built entirely on IEEE-754 floating-point NaN and infinity values.

A new kind of computer architecture that's more elegant than 1s and 0s, being based directly on Mathematics. Note: Everything in here is real (IEEE-754), but the target is computer scientists and the troll level is set to ULTRA. Source code and stuff: tom7.org/nand/

Why it's here

8 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a brilliant, hilarious, and technically impressive satire of computer architecture and floating-point math.

jameson Lobsters • Recommends

NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS

kibwenon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters”

Seconded, thirded, and fourthed. My favorite is "NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS", where he dismisses 0 and 1 as being too ugly to be the foundation of all computation and reinvents computing via the beauty of rational numbers, which is to say, the horror of IEEE754 floating point (along with a working hardware implementation!): link to this video

kibwenon Hacker News • Recommends

On “I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]”

Here's my favorite video of his, where he reinvents computing from scratch while eschewing inelegant 1s and 0s for elegant floating-point values: link to this video

bakuninsbarton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What are some of the most interesting YouTube channels to follow?”

Suckerpinch barely ever releases a video, but when he does they are great. NaN gates and FlipFlops are my favorite: link to this video You can only get good at mathematics by doing, but if there is a channel that helps you get better at math passively it is probably Michael Penns': link

anyfooon Hacker News • Recommends

On “ABC: A C compiler for printable x86”

That's a beautiful form of art, somehow. Far away from the only form of art, but it's the kind of art where a) it's very obvious that you have to be extremely proficient in what you are doing (and so the stupid modern art spectator comment "I could have done this" is quelled from its very spark), and b) it's so useless, especially for the amount of effort put in, that it really only exists for itself and to please both creator and spectator. There is one video of his that takes it to an extreme: link to this video - That is not only impossibly bonkers on just about every level, it's also so incredibly useless that the result is not even observable.

btownon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Supporting half-precision floats is really annoying”

Why stop at half-precision floats? Why not go all the way to 3-bit floats? And build a hardware accelerator out of them? Tom Murphy has you covered with: the NaN Gate. link to this video link

Recursingon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Subtraction Is Functionally Complete”

Reminds me of this wonderful video: link to this video , where he builds computation using only IEEE-754 NaN and infinity

retsibsion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Gaussian Explosion”

Not sure how well it fits what you're looking for, but if you're not already aware of tom7/suckerpinch, you might get a kick out of some of his videos -- e.g. link to this video

MathMonkeyManon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Most ints are not floats”

And the operators +, -, *, and / lack some of the properties of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Tom7 has a good video about this: link to this video

hxtkon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Math.min(Math.max(num, min), max)”

The only reason I know what to expect is because Suckerpinch on YouTube made a video in which he managed to define a logic system using NaN and +∞, and does so by abusing min and max, among other expressions: link to this video