Subject:
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RE: AI and even more exiciting stuff
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Mon, 18 Oct 1999 15:28:02 GMT
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Original-From:
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S. Crawshaw <{sc10003@eng.cam.ac}spamless{.uk}>
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Viewed:
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977 times
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On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Ralph Hempel wrote:
> OK, time to get out the soapbox. If you are trying to teach AI, and are
> using floating point math, then you probably have really fast computers
> with floating point processors that are sometimes quicker than equivalent
> fixed point calcs......
>
> I do hope that the students are getting some numerical methods banged into
> their heads, otherwise how can they accurately asses the errors in their
> AI algorithms?
>
> Which brings me back to fixed point. Once you show someone the simplicity
> and elegance of simple, small, fixed point numbers, they may be able to
> do the complex AI algorithms on embedded machines.
>
> If they don't learn fixed point, they may see a simple 8-bit fixed point
> processor and say it can't do AI because it has no FP numbers....
>
> Just my 2cents, any other views out there on engineering education?
Depends exactly what you're teaching in the class, and how much time you
have. Spending a session teaching fixed point math may well mean that you
have to miss out a useful AI tool. If the students already understand how
to call, say "add(a,b)" then I don't see the relevance *in an AI course*
of teaching them the difference between doing "add()" in floating and
fixed point math.
Probably in a wider computing context they _ought_ to learn about fixed
point math one day, but I would suppose it belongs in a more general
course.
Anyway, that's my 0.02 GBP.
Stuart
===============================================================
Stuart Crawshaw
Control Group
Engineering Dept
Cambridge University
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | RE: AI and even more exiciting stuff
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| (...) Right you are. I guess I wasn't clear headed when I wrote my original response. I wanted to say that engineering (or CS) students shuold learn about fixed point methods at some point in their academic careers. The earlier the better. I was (...) (25 years ago, 18-Oct-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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