Inverse of a SORT is that possible ?

[PB]

See also this thread: http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtopic.php?t=24890

[Derek]

[OT]

down to the shear speed of today's processors I reckon!

Code: Select all

Repeat
Until Random(100000000) = 10

Debug "Located 10 !"

Still took 20 seconds on my fast processor.

I shouldn't do these things, but I actually did a number of runs in the background, debugger on, and doing some forum browsing at the same time... and they average out at 11 seconds here

I only ran it once and kind of guessed at 20 seconds, thinking about it, it was probably a lot shorter than that.

Also, my fast processor isn't my fastest one but it is fast compared to the p233mmx I had ten years ago.

[/OT]

[Trond]

Aye, very nice.

In theory though, this method could lock up, forever in seach of that last 'free' element!

It won't, because the numbers aren't actually random.

That fact that it doesn't lock up is quite surprising; down to the shear speed of today's processors I reckon! Kind of like the following which I would expect to run for a long long time before finishing :

Code: Select all

Repeat
Until Random(100000000) = 10

Debug "Located 10 !"

But that's 1 in 100000000. I just require 1 in 100.

[DoubleDutch]

If people are timing things, then you should agree on an initial seed value, so the results can be properly compared.

[blueznl]

I said: I shouldn't be doing these kind of this.

I regret I did My apologies, it was not my intention to steal this thread. And if we wanna benchmark, I'm pretty sure this is not the best example to do so