system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How do computers interperet infinity?

In Java, there is a field: Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY (and NEGATIVE_INFINITY). How is infinity represented in the most essential form to computers?
gpt
It's just a special bit pattern. The designers of IEEE 754 (the floating point math standard) just picked two patterns to represent + and - infinity. When you do any calculations with floating point numbers, the CPU will check if one of the numbers matches one of these special patterns and act according to the rules of IEEE 754 (so that it knows not to just blindly add the two numbers together, for example).