From: Tom Pollard <tomp@...>
Date: 2006-11-02T08:07:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Fuzzy Time (#99)


On Nov 1, 2006, at 12:05 AM, Cameron Pope wrote:
>> On Oct 31, 2006, at 1:05 AM, Tom Pollard wrote:
>> Out of curiosity, I tried translating Cameron's method into my code.
>> [...]
>> Cameron's method
>> * Choose offset uniformly from the set [-5..1], , but don't change
>> the reported time if the chosen offset would cause it to retrogress.
>> -5   -4   -3   -2   -1    0    1    2    3    4    5
>> 0.0  1.2  7.2 18.1 28.4 28.3 16.7  0.0  0.0  0.0  0.0
>
> That part of my code is kind of obsfuscated, but what it actually does
> is choose an offset uniformly from the set [-20..5], but don't change
> the reported time if the chosen offset would cause it to retrogress.
> This would be roughly equivalent to saying: do not choose a new offset
> 60% of the time. Otherwise, choose from the set [-5..+5] but don't
> retrogress below the low-water-mark.

Yes, I see that now.  (Thanks for the correction.)  I think it's an  
elegant way to deal with the problem, and one that I would probably  
never have thought of, myself.

Cheers,

Tom