Talk:Generate Chess960 starting position: Difference between revisions
Talk:Generate Chess960 starting position (view source)
Revision as of 17:55, 14 May 2014
, 10 years ago→"a bit wasteful": new section
(→random starting position: added the REXX source that produced the histogram.) |
(→"a bit wasteful": new section) |
||
Line 277:
@13000 959/960
Generated all the 960 separations in 13166 attempts</pre>
== "a bit wasteful" ==
A comment on the main page classified pregenerating the 960 positions as "a bit wasteful", and I'm wondering just how wasteful it winds up being.
I did some measurements myself, and I found that the total memory consumed was a fraction of the resources consumed by the language implementation at startup. And, as a one-time cost this seems reasonable. And for more frequent use? Can we get more efficient than the table lookup approach, for this specific problem? (Approximately 7680 bytes to represent the table, and a bit more for the code, and a few microseconds to generate the values. I could see 7680 bytes being too much on a microcontroller, but not so sure about it being a problem on something bigger, like a phone.)
Anyways, it seems to me that "wasteful" would be not using the computer, but I'm also concerned that I might be overlooking an important issue.
(This is not an entirely idle question - I have been seriously wondering about the value of computers to society - you can't eat them, you can't wear them, they mostly seem fad driven, I've been frequently told how they are destroying civilization, I see billions of dollars invested in just sitting there watching them (ops, security, etc), and the high end systems tend to be unreliable in all sorts of ways. I'm aware of large teams of people basically reinventing the wheel on a daily basis in the name of "code reuse". I'm seriously wondering if I shouldn't have gone into agriculture, instead - at least there the benefits are relatively obvious. Of course, I don't expect this forum here to answer all my questions, but I do have a lot of questions about our criteria. Thanks for bearing with me.)
I suppose another way of looking at this would be to suggest that the problem itself is wasteful? Or are these questions and thoughts too harsh? --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] ([[User talk:Rdm|talk]]) 17:55, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
| |||