Ternary floating point

[eudoxie]

Is there any established conventions for ternary floating point numbers?

I've come up with the following specifications for a half-precision-equivalent (with slightly more precision than binary half-precision). Twelve trits long, with the following specifications:

MST...LST | MST ... LST
E E E E S S S S S S S S

Feedback, ideas, ...?

Oh yeah, and I'll be using base 3 for the exponent.

[Shaos]

At January 16th I write this in topic about TRINITY-2004:

Idea about representation of floating point numbers: Lets take "truble" and divide it to 2 parts: 6-trit exponent and 18-trit fraction. By accuracy it is better than 32-bit "float", worse than 64-bit "double" and similar to 36-bit floating number in IBM System/360 from 1964 that had 9-bit sign and exponent and 27-bit fraction. Because of nature of balanced ternary numeric system we don't need "biasing" exponent. Also we don't need separate sign bit - we simply combine it with "hidden" most significant bit of fraction instead and it will be part of full 18-trit fraction. So range of exponent is from -364 to +364 (3^6/2) and fraction from -193710244 to +193710244 (3^18/2 that is max possible integer represented by this floating point format). To simplify formula for calculation number from representation we may simply forget about "fractional" nature of fraction and say F*3^E

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[Shaos]

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