Difference between revisions of "571: Can't Sleep"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Image Text: If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.
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== Image Text ==
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If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.
  
  
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== Description ==
 
In this comic, [[Cueball]] is in bed and is having trouble sleeping. He tries the old standby of counting sheep as they jump over a fence, but upon reaching 32,767 sheep, the sheep all jump back over the fence and start counting up again from -32,768. This is because when an integral number is represented in a digital form, such as on a computer, the number's range is limited by the amount of space used to store it. When the greatest possible number given the storage space is exceeded, an arithmetic overflow occurs, which results in starting over at the least possible number given the storage space. This is not at all unlike a car's odometer. Imagine an odometer with six digits reaching 999999 miles. Upon driving one more mile, the digits will roll back over to 000000.
 
In this comic, [[Cueball]] is in bed and is having trouble sleeping. He tries the old standby of counting sheep as they jump over a fence, but upon reaching 32,767 sheep, the sheep all jump back over the fence and start counting up again from -32,768. This is because when an integral number is represented in a digital form, such as on a computer, the number's range is limited by the amount of space used to store it. When the greatest possible number given the storage space is exceeded, an arithmetic overflow occurs, which results in starting over at the least possible number given the storage space. This is not at all unlike a car's odometer. Imagine an odometer with six digits reaching 999999 miles. Upon driving one more mile, the digits will roll back over to 000000.
  

Revision as of 17:47, 1 August 2012

This is comic number 571. It was posted on April 20, 2009. [1]


cant sleep.png


Image Text

If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.


Description

In this comic, Cueball is in bed and is having trouble sleeping. He tries the old standby of counting sheep as they jump over a fence, but upon reaching 32,767 sheep, the sheep all jump back over the fence and start counting up again from -32,768. This is because when an integral number is represented in a digital form, such as on a computer, the number's range is limited by the amount of space used to store it. When the greatest possible number given the storage space is exceeded, an arithmetic overflow occurs, which results in starting over at the least possible number given the storage space. This is not at all unlike a car's odometer. Imagine an odometer with six digits reaching 999999 miles. Upon driving one more mile, the digits will roll back over to 000000.


In this case, the least and greatest possible numbers are -32,768 and 32,767, which implies that the storage space used would be two bytes. In addition, it's clear that the number is designated as a signed number, meaning that it can be either positive or negative.


The image text refers to the 1968 Philip K. Dick science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into the perhaps more widely known Ridley Scott directed 1982 film Blade Runner. The implication is that if we ever do create androids that dream of electric sheep, we should make sure to give them sufficient storage space to store numbers large enough such that an arithmetic overflow will be far less likely to occur, even if they count for a long time. A "long int" consists of four bytes rather than two, so instead of being limited to a range from -32,768 to 32,767 the number will be capable of storing numbers from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. "sheepCount" is a possible name for a variable to be used in a computer program. Declaring a variable tells the computer that it should allocate a portion of memory to be associated with the variable name given. For those who might be unfamiliar with common programming practices, "sheepCount" is named using what is commonly referred to as CamelCase, meaning that all words in the name ("sheep" and "count") are pushed together and the first letter of every word after the first is capitalized. This is one of several common approaches to naming variables in computer programming.