I'm a programmer by trade by I've run into a weirdly special number and need some help deciphering its significance.
I was writing some machine learning code that compiles into GPU kernel code and the compiler output the number 1.000000015047466E+30 as part of its generated code. It doesn't seem to be a common number of interest from the field of CS (e.g. it's not a power of $2$).
Google searching for this constant just yields a handful of results that seem to suggest it may be a physical constant of some kind:
- This MATLAB forum link suggests it may be a default value for some physical phenomena.
- This Github repo on whole cell electrophysiology seems to use it as a max limit of some kind.
- This Opensea NFT link shows that the number is somehow used as a parameter for some kind of fractal art?
I'm absolutely baffled I have absolutely no clue why this number is appearing in my ML code and why it's also being used in hard science research and fractal art. It lends me to believe this number has some special properties, but I'm not sure what. Any leads would be greatly appreciated.
Could be the single precision floating point number closest to 10^30, so the number you’d get in say C if you write float x = 1e30. You’d need a floating point number with a 70 bit mantissa to represent 10^30 exactly.