Approximate and Stochastic Computing

Fields that trade exactness for efficiency by letting computation be imprecise or probabilistic. It covers hardware and software that accept small errors to save energy or time, and designs that represent numbers as streams of random bits so that simple circuits can do arithmetic. A field belongs here when tolerated error or randomness is deliberate in the design. It excludes the fault tolerance of exact systems and the energy management of conventional hardware, which are treated with reconfigurable and energy-aware hardware.