On the use of continued emotions for digital computer arithmetic

Recently, there has been some interest in the use of continued fractions for digital hardware calculations. We require that the coefficients of the continued fractions be integral powers of two. As a result well known continued fraction expansions of functions cannot be used. Methods of expansion of a large number of functions are presented. We show that the problem of selection of coeffiients of the continued fractions does not have practical solution in most of the cases we have considered. We conjecture that the solution of a polynomial equation is the only problem that can be solved in our formulation.