Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 15:16:51 07/20/98
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On July 20, 1998 at 17:21:31, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >I'll do the test, but I'm not sure why. >The test that I did ran for half an hour, which is enough to average out any >"warming up" necessary, in my opinion. I also ran the unlinking program first, >so the "warm up" advantage would be with the dead bit program. >It also seems to me that the code has been changed enough and the programs >probably ran in different memory spaces anyway, so I doubt caching played a >major role in this. If you do it this way, sandwiching versions A and B, and running the thing several times like ABABABABAB, I believe that you can make a pretty good conclusion about what is happening. You can get a clue about the consistency of the timings you are getting, since you can compare the A's with other A's, and B's with other B's, and you can also show that you aren't having initialization effects, and you are less likely to make a conclusion from a single run that might have gone bogus. If you show that A is slow for one run, then the immediately following B is fast, then the following A is slow again, and the following B is fast again, ad nauseum, I would think that you've pretty much proven that B is faster than A. Whether or not this demonstrates the practical superiority of one algorithm over its variant is not as clear, but it's certainly evidence. One other obvious question is, are you sure that A and B do exactly the same thing? Since the two versions should search exactly the same tree, do you have some way of checking that this is true? What I do in these cases is make sure that the tree sizes are exactly the same after each ply in each problem of the test suite. This isn't perfect but it seems to be close enough. bruce
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