eli5: What are glitches and how do they happen?
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In one example of numerical glitching, devices use numerical representations but they can be approximations. Am example of that is the so-called floating point format used to represent scientific numbers with two parts, a mantissa and an exponent, so indecimal terms we can talk about 5×10^2 for the value 500. This is very useful because it can contain big or small numbers.
The complication is that it is an approximation. Also the computer is rarely using decimal notation so the number becomes a binary number raised to a power of two. Small errors creep on that can quickly disappear or they can be noticeable.
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