From: Isaac Gouy Date: 2006-08-11T02:10:14+09:00 Subject: Re: Been there, done that - language shootout ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote: -snip- > in any case i understand that there are sometimes requirements and that they > are almost always arbitrary, it's just that in the case of the test requiring > a specific random generator the requirement is bordering on arcane since the > benchmarks claim to test specific programs but this requirement makes fasta > actually test two LOL! I have no interest in quarreling about the definition of "program", but following that reasoning perhaps you should have counted the non-random sequence as a separate program, and the selection of cumulative frequency as a separate program, and ... > and, from a logical standpoint, the concept is flawed since > requiring 'specific random numbers' is an oxymoron. Oh, maybe that's why people talk about pseudorandom numbers. > i agree with the poster that said the answer should have been tested to be within a > tolerance to neatly sidestep this ultimately unimportant (wrt to the overall shootout > which, unlike some others i find useful) issue. Have you actually looked at what the fasta programs are doing?! Every year there seem to be people who miss out parts of the NYC marathon course in an attempt to improve their race position - I find it fascinating that people can both understand that a marathon race has an arbitrary standard distance 26 miles 385 yards along an arbitrary route, and still try to avoid doing that standard distance. In contrast, it isn't surprising that programmers try to miss out parts of a computation - it's what we do. The most unnatural thing about writing a program for the Computer Language Shootout is having to write a program constrained to an arbitrary distance and arbitrary route - there's some latitude but not as much as we're accustomed to.