A New Look at the Table-Maker’s Dilemma

In the past, the discovery of ultra-rare compute bugs such as incorrect divisions by Pentium chips or cryptographic hash collisions have set headlines and rocked stock markets. All while the Table Maker’s Dilemma bug, which causes many (but not all) mathematical functions to unexpectedly return slightly incorrect results, remains largely unknown. In my talk I hope to shed some light on this widespread yet poorly understood bug. I will outline a new theoretical framework for modeling its behavior in “the real world”, and raise some open questions.