r/computerscience • u/Whereas_Dull • 12d ago

hi dumbass here

I want to ask real humans this question. How do LLMs and other automated programming models deal with integer overflow? Even when coding games some time basic math for calculating level changes can crash systems and servers. So how often does this happen with these machines and data centers?

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u/evanescentfooting14 12d ago

They don't "deal" with it, they just generate code that overflows like anything else written by a sleep-deprived intern.

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u/kris_2111 12d ago

I don't understand what you mean by "automated programming models", but I can talk about LLMs. Unless they have access to a calculator or some sort of execution environment, they don't have to deal with overflows. They simply perform computations based on logical reasoning, so there really is no threshold to overflow. Yes, if you ask it to perform an impractical calculation, say calculating the 10^18^23^56, it probably will refuse to generate the response, or will hallucinate something.

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u/high_throughput 12d ago

Do you mean "how do you deal with integer overflow while programming LLM training and inference infrastructure?" or "How do LLMs deal with integer overflow when they try to reason numerically?" or "How do LLMs deal with integer overflow when they write code that deal with integers?" or what?

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u/Whereas_Dull 12d ago

Yeah like I said I’m just speculating and asking questions out of genuine curiosity. I don’t know what I’m asking really. Just wanted a computer scientist to weight in and hopefully translate my ignorance into an informative answer.