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NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS

suckerpinch · 314.3K views · 2019-04-01 · 19:08

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Overview

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) presents a deliberately trollish computer architecture built on IEEE-754 floating point, using NaN and infinity to define logic gates. He builds working hardware around the idea.

On Hacker News

HN fans hold it up as a favorite among his videos and an example of gloriously bonkers technical art, and cite it in floating-point discussions.

Recommended by 7 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

Computer architecture & CPUsSatire & parody
Search by tags
ieee-754nanlogic gatestom7hardwarehumor

What people said

bakuninsbart · 2023-03 · Strong recommendation

Suckerpinch barely ever releases a video, but when he does they are great. NaN gates and FlipFlops are my favorite: [VIDEO] You can only get good at mathematics by doing, but if there is a channel that helps you get better at math passively it is probably Michael Penns': [LINK]

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kibwen · 2022-12 · Strong recommendation

Here's my favorite video of his, where he reinvents computing from scratch while eschewing inelegant 1s and 0s for elegant floating-point values: [VIDEO]

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kibwen · 2021-04 · Strong recommendation

Seconded, thirded, and fourthed. My favorite is "NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS", where he dismisses 0 and 1 as being too ugly to be the foundation of all computation and reinvents computing via the beauty of rational numbers, which is to say, the horror of IEEE754 floating point (along with a working hardware implementation!): [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by suckerpinch, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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