Exact Short Products From Truncated Multipliers

Abstract

We sometimes need to compute the most significant digits of the product of small integers with a multiplier requiring much storage: e.g., a large integer (e.g., $5^{100}$) or an irrational number ($\pi$). We only need to access the most significant digits of the multiplier-as long as the integers are sufficiently small. We provide an efficient algorithm to compute the range of integers given a truncated multiplier and a desired number of digits.