Thanks everyone who sent me this amazing tweet! So, as always it’s probably a binary overflow problem and sure enough 2^63 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 which is close!https://twitter.com/neilcodling/status/1190757074164170758 …
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CompSci Lecturer. Go player. Programming language researcher. Idris hacker. Denies knowledge of Whitespace. He/him. http://tinyurl.com/TypeDD
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Matt Parker Retweeted Neil Codling
Thanks everyone who sent me this amazing tweet! So, as always it’s probably a binary overflow problem and sure enough 2^63 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 which is close!https://twitter.com/neilcodling/status/1190757074164170758 …
Matt Parker added,
The “63” tells us that the system was probably using a 64 digit binary number. But instead of a normal number it would have been ‘signed’: meaning one bit is reserved to indicate positive or negative and the remaining 63 bits used for data.
Then something went wrong. A number was subtracted incorrectly, or inverted, rounded etc. No idea. But it ended up 10 off 2^63. This is what that number of stations looks like in binary: 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110110
Matt Parker Retweeted Tahg
Other theories are available! It could have been a signed number gone wrong where the positive/negative indicator was naively processed as part of the number.https://twitter.com/Tahgtahv/status/1190942357652410370 …
Matt Parker added,
No idea what the implementation language is, but 63 bit integers are a neat trick (originating, I think, in early LISP implementations) for avoiding garbage collection... e.g. OCaml uses it.https://blog.janestreet.com/what-is-gained-and-lost-with-63-bit-integers/ …
we'll never need to explicitly name every second byte in our memory space so we can steal their names...
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