US Patent 7809535 Numerical techniques for dynamics simulation

A method for dynamics simulation involves maintaining quantities according to a floating point binary format quantized to a first precision lower than the precision supported by the floating point format. For example, although an IEEE floating point number can represent numbers with a precision of one part in 2^24, the quantities are quantized to a lower precision, such as one part in 2^22. Operations are applied to sets of the quantities by quantizing the intermediate results of the operations to the lower precision than the precision supported by the floating point format.