IT Services Circle

Mar 12, 2026 · Fundamentals

Why Summing All Floats in [-1, 1] Doesn’t Produce Zero – A Brute‑Force Study

This article explores the surprising result that adding every IEEE‑754 floating‑point number between –1 and 1, even with exhaustive brute‑force enumeration in Rust, yields a non‑zero sum due to representation limits, rounding errors, and accumulation order effects.