On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:06:29AM -0700, Andrew Agno wrote: > Dave Sherohman writes: > > faster than a quicksort.) If you are required to use a small data > > set, just perform more repetitions to get measurable data. > > This also allows you to obtain statistics like standard deviations and > confidence intervals.
Umm... No. If you run 10,000 reps and only measure the total time (because each rep is too quick to be measured individually), you can only determine the mean time per rep. You'd need the individual rep times to derive any other stats, unless there are some fancy techniques that I'm not aware of. (If you do 2 reps and only measure that the total time is 10 ms, you have no way of knowing whether the individual times were 5 ms and 5 ms or 1 ms and 9 ms. This makes computing anything other than the mean rather difficult.) -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Mr. Slippery
