floating point

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floating point A style of expressing a number that avoids losing significant figures should the number be too large or too small for a given register on a calculating device. For example, 165 400 can be written as 1.654 × 105 in floating point (although computers usually use base-2 rather than base-10). Floating-point amplifiers rather than binary amplifiers are being used increasingly in seismic amplification systems to increase the effective range of digital recordings.