would ever occur in real life

That’s sort of part of the joke. ACM is the “Association for Computing Machinery” one of the biggest and oldest and nerdiest computer clubs.

ACM hosts all kinds of SIGs (special interest groups) - clubs dedicated to interest in (sometimes deeply esoteric) aspects of computer science. For a few of them, hand-coding a new specialized fast point calculation code during a contest could easily come up.

And ACM has a code of ethics, so it is technically possible to get kicked out.

So there’s technically a situation where lying to a peer, on purpose, in a particularly mean context (such as a competition) about a floating point number computation - could actually get someone kicked out of ACM.