Floating Point Numerics for Games and Simulations

Floating point is ubiquitous in computers, where it is the default way to represent non-integer numbers. However, few people understand it. We all see weird behavior sometimes, and many programmers treat it as a mystical and imprecise system of math that just works until it sometimes doesn’t. We hear that we shouldn’t trust floating point with money, we know that 0.1 + 0.2 does not equal 0.3, and “NaN” shows up in our logs when things break. We rarely hear why any of this is the case, and l...