The method is simple. You guess the answer first ... For example, suppose you wanted to take the square root of 85. You can observe that 9 squared is 81, so the answer is sort of 9, right?

Making life simpler, [nats.fr] settled on a gamma of two, which means taking a bunch of square roots, which isn’t fast on an FPGA. [nats]’s algorithm is pretty neat: it uses a first-stage ...