ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Leveling (tapered floating point)

Okay kiddo, let me explain an important topic to you - leveling or tapered floating point. Imagine you have a big pile of sand and you want to make it flat on top. You can use a tool like a ruler or a flat board to level it out.

Similarly, in computers, there are numbers that have a lot of digits after the decimal point, and it's difficult to keep track of them all. So, computer scientists came up with a way to make those numbers easier to work with. They called it a "floating point" system.

This system works by using "exponents" and "mantissas". Exponents are just a fancy way of saying a number raised to a power. Mantissas are the actual digits that come after the decimal point.

Now, in a "tapered" or "gradual" floating point system, the digits in the mantissa get smaller and smaller the farther away they are from the decimal point. This makes it possible to represent very large and very small numbers with only a few digits.

For example, let's say we have the number 1,234.56789. In a tapered floating point system, we could represent it as 1.23456789 x 10^3. The "10^3" part is the exponent and the "1.23456789" part is the mantissa.

So, that's the basic idea behind leveling or tapered floating point systems. It's a way to make really big or really small numbers easier to work with by representing them in a simpler way. I hope that helps!
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