Herbie detects inaccurate expressions and finds more accurate replacements

https://herbie.uwplse.org/

78•bwidlar•6mo ago

Comments

4gotunameagain•6mo ago

This tool is amazing. I've used it many times when I want to run simulations with symplectic integrators over large time horizons in an effort to reduce the total accumulated error !

permalaise•6mo ago

This looks like really interesting and valuable work.

tialaramex•6mo ago

Herbie - the tool which exists today - is excellent, but the perhaps more significant insight is that this could and should in principle be baked into compilers.

That is, a future language should let you say here's a real expression, and I want you to give me an approximation in my 64-bit floating point representation, and here's the parameters for accuracy and performance. What do those parameters look like? Herbie's existing UI might help us somewhat but it's definitely up for experimentation.

Compare regular expression handling - you are not expected in any popular language today to manually translate the expression into an FSM and then run the FSM, that's all done for you, you just write down the expression, real arithmetic could be the same.

ashirviskas•6mo ago

I wonder whether this could help optimize AI inference and training engines or are they already squeezed to the max. llama.cpp could potentially be a great target.

TheFuzzball•6mo ago

Just hope that Herbie doesn't go bananas again

RossBencina•6mo ago

Definitely an interesting idea. It has been discussed here a bunch of times before. Usually someone points out cases where it doesn't do so well. Has it been updated lately?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38451680 (159 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069465 (152 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964617 (117 points)

russfink•6mo ago

Can someone explain why sqrt(x+1) - sqrt(x) is “inaccurate” for all x>1? Inaccurate how, and why, and why is 1/(…) any better? Thanks.

Piezoid•6mo ago

Close floating-point subtraction loses precision: when x >> 1, sqrt(x+1) ≈ sqrt(x), so their difference suffers cancellation and end up rounding to zero. In contrast, sqrt(x+1) + sqrt(x) approaches 2*sqrt(x) smoothly.

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)

Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding

Speed up responses with fast mode

Software factories and the agentic moment

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

LLMs as the new high level language

First Proof

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Show HN: Axiomeer – An open marketplace for AI agents

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

The silent death of good code

Selection rather than prediction

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Where did all the starships go?

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Vouch

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox