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Little Math Trick
Submitted by |
For what its worth here's a cool little thing I 'discovered' recently.
We all know that loops take up most of program execution. Reducing time in loops
can go a long way in optimizing your code. In the spirit of optimizing loop
times I'll point your attention to a situation where you are multiplying an
accumulator by a constant value (a geometric sequence for you math guys).
Generally you would do this:
float result, r;
int i;
result = 3.0f;
r = 2.0f;
for (i=0; i<SOME_VALUE; i++)
result *= r; |
Thats spectacular, but isn't addition faster?
Why yes, but how can we add if we're multiplying?
Like this:
float result, r;
int i;
result = log(3.0f);
r = log(2.0f);
for (i=0; i<SOME_VALUE; i++)
result += r;
result = exp(result); |
Now we're adding instead of multipying!
I've tested this, and it works. You introduce error into the result, but any
floating point op on a computer does that. Here are my results from a little
test proggie I wrote:
Start conditions:
Initial value: 1.000000e+064
Multiplier: 9.99999999999e-1
# Reps: 1000000000
Without optimization:
Result: 9.990005e+063
Time: 10144
Result: 9.990057e+063
With optimization:
Result: 9.990057e+063
Time: 6059
Percent error: 0.000005
Performance increase: 1.674204
Not bad. If you have multiple geometric sequences in a single loop your savings
are doubled. Of course if you're doing a small number of repetitions then the
cost of using two log()'s and an exp() probably won't make it worth the trouble,
but for larger, tight loops it can give you a significant speed boost.
Mike Reid aka "Leon Rauis" aka "Promiscuous Robot"
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The zip file viewer built into the Developer Toolbox made use
of the zlib library, as well as the zlibdll source additions.
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