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• F# and the rose-tinted reflection

  - by CliveT

  We're already seeing increasing use of many cores on client desktops. It is a change that has been long predicted. It is not just a change in architecture, but our notions of efficiency in a program. No longer can we focus on the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm by counting the steps that a single core processor would take to execute it. Instead we'll soon be more concerned about the scalability of the algorithm and how well we can increase the performance as we increase the number of cores. This may even lead us to throw away our most efficient algorithms, and switch to less efficient algorithms that scale better. We might even be willing to waste cycles in order to speculatively execute at the algorithm rather than the hardware level. State is the big headache in this parallel world. At the hardware level, main memory doesn't necessarily contain the definitive value corresponding to a particular address. An update to a location might still be held in a CPU's local cache and it might be some time before the value gets propagated. To get the latest value, and the notion of "latest" takes a lot of defining in this world of rapidly mutating state, the CPUs may well need to communicate to decide who has the definitive value of a particular address in order to avoid lost updates. At the user program level, this means programmers will need to lock objects before modifying them, or attempt to avoid the overhead of locking by understanding the memory models at a very deep level. I think it's this need to avoid statefulness that has led to the recent resurgence of interest in functional languages. In the 1980s, functional languages started getting traction when research was carried out into how programs in such languages could be auto-parallelised. Sadly, the impracticality of some of the languages, the overheads of communication during this parallel execution, and rapid improvements in compiler technology on stock hardware meant that the functional languages fell by the wayside. The one thing that these languages were good at was getting rid of implicit state, and this single idea seems like a solution to the problems we are going to face in the coming years. Whether these languages will catch on is hard to predict. The mindset for writing a program in a functional language is really very different from the way that object-oriented problem decomposition happens - one has to focus on the verbs instead of the nouns, which takes some getting used to. There are a number of hybrid functional/object languages that have been becoming more popular in recent times. These half-way houses make it easy to use functional ideas for some parts of the program while still allowing access to the underlying object-focused platform without a great deal of impedance mismatch. One example is F# running on the CLR which, in Visual Studio 2010, has because a first class member of the pack. Inside Visual Studio 2010, the tooling for F# has improved to the point where it is easy to set breakpoints and watch values change while debugging at the source level. In my opinion, it is the tooling support that will enable the widespread adoption of functional languages - without this support, people will put off any transition into the functional world for as long as they possibly can. Without tool support it will make it hard to learn these languages. One tool that doesn't currently support F# is Reflector. The idea of decompiling IL to a functional language is daunting, but F# is potentially so important I couldn't dismiss the idea. As I'm currently developing Reflector 6.5, I thought it wise to take four days just to see how far I could get in doing so, even if it achieved little more than to be clearer on how much was possible, and how long it might take. You can read what happened here, and of the insights it gave us on ways to improve the tool.

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• Speeding up procedural texture generation

  - by FalconNL

  Recently I've begun working on a game that takes place in a procedurally generated solar system. After a bit of a learning curve (having neither worked with Scala, OpenGL 2 ES or Libgdx before), I have a basic tech demo going where you spin around a single procedurally textured planet: The problem I'm running into is the performance of the texture generation. A quick overview of what I'm doing: a planet is a cube that has been deformed to a sphere. To each side, a n x n (e.g. 256 x 256) texture is applied, which are bundled in one 8n x n texture that is sent to the fragment shader. The last two spaces are not used, they're only there to make sure the width is a power of 2. The texture is currently generated on the CPU, using the updated 2012 version of the simplex noise algorithm linked to in the paper 'Simplex noise demystified'. The scene I'm using to test the algorithm contains two spheres: the planet and the background. Both use a greyscale texture consisting of six octaves of 3D simplex noise, so for example if we choose 128x128 as the texture size there are 128 x 128 x 6 x 2 x 6 = about 1.2 million calls to the noise function. The closest you will get to the planet is about what's shown in the screenshot and since the game's target resolution is 1280x720 that means I'd prefer to use 512x512 textures. Combine that with the fact the actual textures will of course be more complicated than basic noise (There will be a day and night texture, blended in the fragment shader based on sunlight, and a specular mask. I need noise for continents, terrain color variation, clouds, city lights, etc.) and we're looking at something like 512 x 512 x 6 x 3 x 15 = 70 million noise calls for the planet alone. In the final game, there will be activities when traveling between planets, so a wait of 5 or 10 seconds, possibly 20, would be acceptable since I can calculate the texture in the background while traveling, though obviously the faster the better. Getting back to our test scene, performance on my PC isn't too terrible, though still too slow considering the final result is going to be about 60 times worse: 128x128 : 0.1s 256x256 : 0.4s 512x512 : 1.7s This is after I moved all performance-critical code to Java, since trying to do so in Scala was a lot worse. Running this on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S3), however, produces a more problematic result: 128x128 : 2s 256x256 : 7s 512x512 : 29s Already far too long, and that's not even factoring in the fact that it'll be minutes instead of seconds in the final version. Clearly something needs to be done. Personally, I see a few potential avenues, though I'm not particularly keen on any of them yet: Don't precalculate the textures, but let the fragment shader calculate everything. Probably not feasible, because at one point I had the background as a fullscreen quad with a pixel shader and I got about 1 fps on my phone. Use the GPU to render the texture once, store it and use the stored texture from then on. Upside: might be faster than doing it on the CPU since the GPU is supposed to be faster at floating point calculations. Downside: effects that cannot (easily) be expressed as functions of simplex noise (e.g. gas planet vortices, moon craters, etc.) are a lot more difficult to code in GLSL than in Scala/Java. Calculate a large amount of noise textures and ship them with the application. I'd like to avoid this if at all possible. Lower the resolution. Buys me a 4x performance gain, which isn't really enough plus I lose a lot of quality. Find a faster noise algorithm. If anyone has one I'm all ears, but simplex is already supposed to be faster than perlin. Adopt a pixel art style, allowing for lower resolution textures and fewer noise octaves. While I originally envisioned the game in this style, I've come to prefer the realistic approach. I'm doing something wrong and the performance should already be one or two orders of magnitude better. If this is the case, please let me know. If anyone has any suggestions, tips, workarounds, or other comments regarding this problem I'd love to hear them.

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• Fastest pathfinding for static node matrix

  - by Sean Martin

  I'm programming a route finding routine in VB.NET for an online game I play, and I'm searching for the fastest route finding algorithm for my map type. The game takes place in space, with thousands of solar systems connected by jump gates. The game devs have provided a DB dump containing a list of every system and the systems it can jump to. The map isn't quite a node tree, since some branches can jump to other branches - more of a matrix. What I need is a fast pathfinding algorithm. I have already implemented an A* routine and a Dijkstra's, both find the best path but are too slow for my purposes - a search that considers about 5000 nodes takes over 20 seconds to compute. A similar program on a website can do the same search in less than a second. This website claims to use D*, which I have looked into. That algorithm seems more appropriate for dynamic maps rather than one that does not change - unless I misunderstand it's premise. So is there something faster I can use for a map that is not your typical tile/polygon base? GBFS? Perhaps a DFS? Or have I likely got some problem with my A* - maybe poorly chosen heuristics or movement cost? Currently my movement cost is the length of the jump (the DB dump has solar system coordinates as well), and the heuristic is a quick euclidean calculation from the node to the goal. In case anyone has some optimizations for my A*, here is the routine that consumes about 60% of my processing time, according to my profiler. The coordinateData table contains a list of every system's coordinates, and neighborNode.distance is the distance of the jump. Private Function findDistance(ByVal startSystem As Integer, ByVal endSystem As Integer) As Integer 'hCount += 1 'If hCount Mod 0 = 0 Then 'Return hCache 'End If 'Initialize variables to be filled Dim x1, x2, y1, y2, z1, z2 As Integer 'LINQ queries for solar system data Dim systemFromData = From result In jumpDataDB.coordinateDatas Where result.systemId = startSystem Select result.x, result.y, result.z Dim systemToData = From result In jumpDataDB.coordinateDatas Where result.systemId = endSystem Select result.x, result.y, result.z 'LINQ execute 'Fill variables with solar system data for from and to system For Each solarSystem In systemFromData x1 = (solarSystem.x) y1 = (solarSystem.y) z1 = (solarSystem.z) Next For Each solarSystem In systemToData x2 = (solarSystem.x) y2 = (solarSystem.y) z2 = (solarSystem.z) Next Dim x3 = Math.Abs(x1 - x2) Dim y3 = Math.Abs(y1 - y2) Dim z3 = Math.Abs(z1 - z2) 'Calculate distance and round 'Dim distance = Math.Round(Math.Sqrt(Math.Abs((x1 - x2) ^ 2) + Math.Abs((y1 - y2) ^ 2) + Math.Abs((z1 - z2) ^ 2))) Dim distance = firstConstant * Math.Min(secondConstant * (x3 + y3 + z3), Math.Max(x3, Math.Max(y3, z3))) 'Dim distance = Math.Abs(x1 - x2) + Math.Abs(z1 - z2) + Math.Abs(y1 - y2) 'hCache = distance Return distance End Function And the main loop, the other 30% 'Begin search While openList.Count() != 0 'Set current system and move node to closed currentNode = lowestF() move(currentNode.id) For Each neighborNode In neighborNodes If Not onList(neighborNode.toSystem, 0) Then If Not onList(neighborNode.toSystem, 1) Then Dim newNode As New nodeData() newNode.id = neighborNode.toSystem newNode.parent = currentNode.id newNode.g = currentNode.g + neighborNode.distance newNode.h = findDistance(newNode.id, endSystem) newNode.f = newNode.g + newNode.h newNode.security = neighborNode.security openList.Add(newNode) shortOpenList(OLindex) = newNode.id OLindex += 1 Else Dim proposedG As Integer = currentNode.g + neighborNode.distance If proposedG < gValue(neighborNode.toSystem) Then changeParent(neighborNode.toSystem, currentNode.id, proposedG) End If End If End If Next 'Check to see if done If currentNode.id = endSystem Then Exit While End If End While If clarification is needed on my spaghetti code, I'll try to explain.

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• Skewed: a rotating camera in a simple CPU-based voxel raycaster/raytracer

  - by voxelizr

  TL;DR -- in my first simple software voxel raycaster, I cannot get camera rotations to work, seemingly correct matrices notwithstanding. The result is skewed: like a flat rendering, correctly rotated, however distorted and without depth. (While axis-aligned ie. unrotated, depth and parallax are as expected.) I'm trying to write a simple voxel raycaster as a learning exercise. This is purely CPU based for now until I figure out how things work exactly -- fow now, OpenGL is just (ab)used to blit the generated bitmap to the screen as often as possible. Now I have gotten to the point where a perspective-projection camera can move through the world and I can render (mostly, minus some artifacts that need investigation) perspective-correct 3-dimensional views of the "world", which is basically empty but contains a voxel cube of the Stanford Bunny. So I have a camera that I can move up and down, strafe left and right and "walk forward/backward" -- all axis-aligned so far, no camera rotations. Herein lies my problem. Screenshot #1: correct depth when the camera is still strictly axis-aligned, ie. un-rotated. Now I have for a few days been trying to get rotation to work. The basic logic and theory behind matrices and 3D rotations, in theory, is very clear to me. Yet I have only ever achieved a "2.5 rendering" when the camera rotates... fish-eyey, bit like in Google Streetview: even though I have a volumetric world representation, it seems --no matter what I try-- like I would first create a rendering from the "front view", then rotate that flat rendering according to camera rotation. Needless to say, I'm by now aware that rotating rays is not particularly necessary and error-prone. Still, in my most recent setup, with the most simplified raycast ray-position-and-direction algorithm possible, my rotation still produces the same fish-eyey flat-render-rotated style looks: Screenshot #2: camera "rotated to the right by 39 degrees" -- note how the blue-shaded left-hand side of the cube from screen #2 is not visible in this rotation, yet by now "it really should"! Now of course I'm aware of this: in a simple axis-aligned-no-rotation-setup like I had in the beginning, the ray simply traverses in small steps the positive z-direction, diverging to the left or right and top or bottom only depending on pixel position and projection matrix. As I "rotate the camera to the right or left" -- ie I rotate it around the Y-axis -- those very steps should be simply transformed by the proper rotation matrix, right? So for forward-traversal the Z-step gets a bit smaller the more the cam rotates, offset by an "increase" in the X-step. Yet for the pixel-position-based horizontal+vertical-divergence, increasing fractions of the x-step need to be "added" to the z-step. Somehow, none of my many matrices that I experimented with, nor my experiments with matrix-less hardcoded verbose sin/cos calculations really get this part right. Here's my basic per-ray pre-traversal algorithm -- syntax in Go, but take it as pseudocode: fx and fy: pixel positions x and y rayPos: vec3 for the ray starting position in world-space (calculated as below) rayDir: vec3 for the xyz-steps to be added to rayPos in each step during ray traversal rayStep: a temporary vec3 camPos: vec3 for the camera position in world space camRad: vec3 for camera rotation in radians pmat: typical perspective projection matrix The algorithm / pseudocode: // 1: rayPos is for now "this pixel, as a vector on the view plane in 3d, at The Origin" rayPos.X, rayPos.Y, rayPos.Z = ((fx / width) - 0.5), ((fy / height) - 0.5), 0 // 2: rotate around Y axis depending on cam rotation. No prob since view plane still at Origin 0,0,0 rayPos.MultMat(num.NewDmat4RotationY(camRad.Y)) // 3: a temp vec3. planeDist is -0.15 or some such -- fov-based dist of view plane from eye and also the non-normalized, "in axis-aligned world" traversal step size "forward into the screen" rayStep.X, rayStep.Y, rayStep.Z = 0, 0, planeDist // 4: rotate this too -- 0,zstep should become some meaningful xzstep,xzstep rayStep.MultMat(num.NewDmat4RotationY(CamRad.Y)) // set up direction vector from still-origin-based-ray-position-off-rotated-view-plane plus rotated-zstep-vector rayDir.X, rayDir.Y, rayDir.Z = -rayPos.X - me.rayStep.X, -rayPos.Y, rayPos.Z + rayStep.Z // perspective projection rayDir.Normalize() rayDir.MultMat(pmat) // before traversal, the ray starting position has to be transformed from origin-relative to campos-relative rayPos.Add(camPos) I'm skipping the traversal and sampling parts -- as per screens #1 through #3, those are "basically mostly correct" (though not pretty) -- when axis-aligned / unrotated.

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• How to prepare for a programming competition? Graphs, Stacks, Trees, oh my! [closed]

  - by Simucal

  Last semester I attended ACM's (Association for Computing Machinery) bi-annual programming competition at a local University. My University sent 2 teams of 3 people and we competed amongst other schools in the mid-west. We got our butts kicked. You are given a packet with about 11 problems (1 problem per page) and you have 4 hours to solve as many as you can. They'll run your program you submit against a set of data and your output must match theirs exactly. In fact, the judging is automated for the most part. In any case.. I went there fairly confident in my programming skills and I left there feeling drained and weak. It was a terribly humbling experience. In 4 hours my team of 3 people completed only one of the problems. The top team completed 4 of them and took 1st place. The problems they asked were like no problems I have ever had to answer before. I later learned that in order to solve them some of them effectively you have to use graphs/graph algorithms, trees, stacks. Some of them were simply "greedy" algo's. My question is, how can I better prepare for this semesters programming competition so I don't leave there feeling like a complete moron? What tips do you have for me to be able to answer these problems that involve graphs, trees, various "well known" algorithms? How can I easily identify the algorithm we should implement for a given problem? I have yet to take Algorithm Design in school so I just feel a little out of my element. Here are some examples of the questions asked at the competitions: ACM Problem Sets Update: Just wanted to update this since the latest competition is over. My team placed 1st for our small region (about 6-7 universities with between 1-5 teams each school) and ~15th for the midwest! So, it is a marked improvement over last years performance for sure. We also had no graduate students on our team and after reviewing the rules we found out that many teams had several! So, that would be a pretty big advantage in my own opinion. Problems this semester ranged from about 1-2 "easy" problems (ie bit manipulation, string manipulation) to hard (graph problems involving fairly complex math and network flow problems). We were able to solve 4 problems in our 5 hours. Just wanted to thank everyone for the resources they provided here, we used them for our weekly team practices and it definitely helped! Some quick tips that I have that aren't suggested below: When you are seated at your computer before the competition starts, quickly type out various data structures that you might need that you won't have access to in your languages libraries. I typed out a Graph data-structure complete with floyd-warshall and dijkstra's algorithm before the competition began. We ended up using it in our 2nd problem that we solved and this is the main reason why we solved this problem before anyone else in the midwest. We had it ready to go from the beginning. Similarly, type out the code to read in a file since this will be required for every problem. Save this answer "template" someplace so you can quickly copy/paste it to your IDE at the beginning of each problem. There are no rules on programming anything before the competition starts so get any boilerplate code out the way. We found it useful to have one person who is on permanent whiteboard duty. This is usually the person who is best at math and at working out solutions to get a head start on future problems you will be doing. One person is on permanent programming duty. Your fastest/most skilled "programmer" (most familiar with the language). This will save debugging time also. The last person has several roles between assessing the packet of problems for the next "easiest" problem, helping the person on the whiteboard work out solutions and helping the person programming work out bugs/issues. This person needs to be flexible and be able to switch between roles easily.

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• IHRIM's Latest Workforce Solutions Review Focuses on Risk!

  - by Jay Richey, HCM Product Marketing

  IHRIM's latest edition of the Workforce Solution's Review magazine (in print and online) has some really compelling features and articles focused on HCM risk and compliance management.  Check out this line-up and sign up if you aren't already a member.  It's well worth it.  http://www.ihrimpublications.com/WSR_about.php Three to Watch: HR's Growing Compliance Responsibilities for Data Security, Genetic Nondiscrimination, and Anti-Bribery Laws     By W. Scott Blackmer and Richard Santalesa, InfoLawGroup, LLP Global HR and International Background Check Best Practices     By Terry Corley, Aletheia Consulting Group Compliance: Old Wine in New Wineskins?     By Ursula Christina Fellberg, Ph.D., UCF-StrategieBeraterin Join the HR/HR technology professionals who have subscribed for so many years to IHRIM’s publications and become a reader today by visiting  http://www.ihrimpublications.com/amember/signup.php.  

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• Observing flow control idle time in TCP

  - by user12820842

  Previously I described how to observe congestion control strategies during transmission, and here I talked about TCP's sliding window approach for handling flow control on the receive side. A neat trick would now be to put the pieces together and ask the following question - how often is TCP transmission blocked by congestion control (send-side flow control) versus a zero-sized send window (which is the receiver saying it cannot process any more data)? So in effect we are asking whether the size of the receive window of the peer or the congestion control strategy may be sub-optimal. The result of such a problem would be that we have TCP data that we could be transmitting but we are not, potentially effecting throughput. So flow control is in effect: when the congestion window is less than or equal to the amount of bytes outstanding on the connection. We can derive this from args[3]-tcps_snxt - args[3]-tcps_suna, i.e. the difference between the next sequence number to send and the lowest unacknowledged sequence number; and when the window in the TCP segment received is advertised as 0 We time from these events until we send new data (i.e. args[4]-tcp_seq = snxt value when window closes. Here's the script: #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s #pragma D option quiet tcp:::send / (args[3]-tcps_snxt - args[3]-tcps_suna) = args[3]-tcps_cwnd / { cwndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid] = timestamp; cwndsnxt[args[1]-cs_cid] = args[3]-tcps_snxt; @numclosed["cwnd", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = count(); } tcp:::send / cwndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid] && args[4]-tcp_seq = cwndsnxt[args[1]-cs_cid] / { @meantimeclosed["cwnd", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = avg(timestamp - cwndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid]); @stddevtimeclosed["cwnd", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = stddev(timestamp - cwndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid]); @numclosed["cwnd", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = count(); cwndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid] = 0; cwndsnxt[args[1]-cs_cid] = 0; } tcp:::receive / args[4]-tcp_window == 0 && (args[4]-tcp_flags & (TH_SYN|TH_RST|TH_FIN)) == 0 / { swndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid] = timestamp; swndsnxt[args[1]-cs_cid] = args[3]-tcps_snxt; @numclosed["swnd", args[2]-ip_saddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = count(); } tcp:::send / swndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid] && args[4]-tcp_seq = swndsnxt[args[1]-cs_cid] / { @meantimeclosed["swnd", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_sport] = avg(timestamp - swndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid]); @stddevtimeclosed["swnd", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_sport] = stddev(timestamp - swndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid]); swndclosed[args[1]-cs_cid] = 0; swndsnxt[args[1]-cs_cid] = 0; } END { printf("%-6s %-20s %-8s %-25s %-8s %-8s\n", "Window", "Remote host", "Port", "TCP Avg WndClosed(ns)", "StdDev", "Num"); printa("%-6s %-20s %-8d %@-25d %@-8d %@-8d\n", @meantimeclosed, @stddevtimeclosed, @numclosed); } So this script will show us whether the peer's receive window size is preventing flow ("swnd" events) or whether congestion control is limiting flow ("cwnd" events). As an example I traced on a server with a large file transfer in progress via a webserver and with an active ssh connection running "find / -depth -print". Here is the output: ^C Window Remote host Port TCP Avg WndClosed(ns) StdDev Num cwnd 10.175.96.92 80 86064329 77311705 125 cwnd 10.175.96.92 22 122068522 151039669 81 So we see in this case, the congestion window closes 125 times for port 80 connections and 81 times for ssh. The average time the window is closed is 0.086sec for port 80 and 0.12sec for port 22. So if you wish to change congestion control algorithm in Oracle Solaris 11, a useful step may be to see if congestion really is an issue on your network. Scripts like the one posted above can help assess this, but it's worth reiterating that if congestion control is occuring, that's not necessarily a problem that needs fixing. Recall that congestion control is about controlling flow to prevent large-scale drops, so looking at congestion events in isolation doesn't tell us the whole story. For example, are we seeing more congestion events with one control algorithm, but more drops/retransmission with another? As always, it's best to start with measures of throughput and latency before arriving at a specific hypothesis such as "my congestion control algorithm is sub-optimal".

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• What are best practices for testing programs with stochastic behavior?

  - by John Doucette

  Doing R&D work, I often find myself writing programs that have some large degree of randomness in their behavior. For example, when I work in Genetic Programming, I often write programs that generate and execute arbitrary random source code. A problem with testing such code is that bugs are often intermittent and can be very hard to reproduce. This goes beyond just setting a random seed to the same value and starting execution over. For instance, code might read a message from the kernal ring buffer, and then make conditional jumps on the message contents. Naturally, the ring buffer's state will have changed when one later attempts to reproduce the issue. Even though this behavior is a feature it can trigger other code in unexpected ways, and thus often reveals bugs that unit tests (or human testers) don't find. Are there established best practices for testing systems of this sort? If so, some references would be very helpful. If not, any other suggestions are welcome!

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• Optimization of time-varying parameters

  - by brama

  I need to find an optimal set of "n" parameter values that minimize an objective function (a 2-hr simulation of a system). I have looked at genetic algorithm and simulated annealing methods, but was wondering if there are any better algorithms and guidance on their merits and limitations. With the above optimization methods I can find the optimal parameter values that hold true for the entire simulation duration. Incase, I want to find the optimal "time varying" parameter values (parameter values change with time during the 2-hr simulation), are there any methods/ideas other than making each time varying parameter value a variable to optimize? Any thoughts?

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• How should I choose quadtree depth?

  - by Evpok

  I'm using a quadtree to prune collision detection pairs in a 2d world. How should I choose to what depth said quadtree is calculated? The world is made mostly of moving objects1, so the cost of dispatching the objects between the quadtree cells matters. What is the relationship between the gain from less collision checking and the loss from more dispatching? How can I strike a balance that performs optimally? 1 To be completely explicit, they are autonomous self-replicating cells competing for food sources. This is an attempt to show my pupils predator-prey dynamics and genetic evolution at work.

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• How would you tackle a pattern-finding program?

  - by Neil

  Just to be clear, I don't think this should be question better suited for stackoverflow.com simply because there's not a single answer but a wide range of possible solutions, making this question far more subjective in nature. I was curious how you guys would tackle a pattern-finding program, which is to say I'd do the following operations: I enter in some input. Program predicts my next input based on all previous inputs. Rinse. Repeat. Since the amount of input I could provide is so varied, including empty strings, conventional means such as switches or regular expressions are out, since it would require you to have an inkling of information about what to expect. I was thinking about some form of genetic algorithm, yet even then I don't have a clue as to how to approach a problem of this caliber. I think some feedback mechanism would be necessary as well as to let the program know how close it was. Anyone had to do a similar type program before?

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• Reading graph inputs for a programming puzzle and then solving it

  - by Vrashabh

  I just took a programming competition question and I absolutely bombed it. I had trouble right at the beginning itself from reading the input set. The question was basically a variant of this puzzle http://codercharts.com/puzzle/evacuation-plan but also had an hour component in the first line(say 3 hours after start of evacuation). It reads like this This puzzle is a tribute to all the people who suffered from the earthquake in Japan. The goal of this puzzle is, given a network of road and locations, to determine the maximum number of people that can be evacuated. The people must be evacuated from evacuation points to rescue points. The list of road and the number of people they can carry per hour is provided. Input Specifications Your program must accept one and only one command line argument: the input file. The input file is formatted as follows: the first line contains 4 integers n r s t n is the number of locations (each location is given by a number from 0 to n-1) r is the number of roads s is the number of locations to be evacuated from (evacuation points) t is the number of locations where people must be evacuated to (rescue points) the second line contains s integers giving the locations of the evacuation points the third line contains t integers giving the locations of the rescue points the r following lines contain to the road definitions. Each road is defined by 3 integers l1 l2 width where l1 and l2 are the locations connected by the road (roads are one-way) and width is the number of people per hour that can fit on the road Now look at the sample input set 5 5 1 2 3 0 3 4 0 1 10 0 2 5 1 2 4 1 3 5 2 4 10 The 3 in the first line is the additional component and is defined as the number of hours since the resuce has started which is 3 in this case. Now my solution was to use Dijisktras algorithm to find the shortest path between each of the rescue and evac nodes. Now my problem started with how to read the input set. I read the first line in python and stored the values in variables. But then I did not know how to store the values of the distance between the nodes and what DS to use and how to input it to say a standard implementation of dijikstras algorithm. So my question is two fold 1.) How do I take the input of such problems? - I have faced this problem in quite a few competitions recently and I hope I can get a simple code snippet or an explanation in java or python to read the data input set in such a way that I can input it as a graph to graph algorithms like dijikstra and floyd/warshall. Also a solution to the above problem would also help. 2.) How to solve this puzzle? My algorithm was: Find shortest path between evac points (in the above example it is 14 from 0 to 3) Multiply it by number of hours to get maximal number of saves Also the answer given for the variant for the input set was 24 which I dont understand. Can someone explain that also. UPDATE: I get how the answer is 14 in the given problem link - it seems to be just the shortest path between node 0 and 3. But with the 3 hour component how is the answer 24 UPDATE I get how it is 24 - its a complete graph traversal at every hour and this is how I solve it Hour 1 Node 0 to Node 1 - 10 people Node 0 to Node 2- 5 people TotalRescueCount=0 Node 1=10 Node 2= 5 Hour 2 Node 1 to Node 3 = 5(Rescued) Node 2 to Node 4 = 5(Rescued) Node 0 to Node 1 = 10 Node 0 to Node 2 = 5 Node 1 to Node 2 = 4 TotalRescueCount = 10 Node 1 = 10 Node 2= 5+4 = 9 Hour 3 Node 1 to Node 3 = 5(Rescued) Node 2 to Node 4 = 5+4 = 9(Rescued) TotalRescueCount = 9+5+10 = 24 It hard enough for this case , for multiple evac and rescue points how in the world would I write a pgm for this ?

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• Modular Reduction of Polynomials in NTRUEncrypt

  - by Neville

  Hello everyone. I'm implementing the NTRUEncrypt algorithm, according to an NTRU tutorial, a polynomial f has an inverse g such that f*g=1 mod x, basically the polynomial multiplied by its inverse reduced modulo x gives 1. I get the concept but in an example they provide, a polynomial f = -1 + X + X^2 - X4 + X6 + X9 - X10 which we will represent as the array [-1,1,1,0,-1,0,1,0,0,1,-1] has an inverse g of [1,2,0,2,2,1,0,2,1,2,0], so that when we multiply them and reduce the result modulo 3 we get 1, however when I use the NTRU algorithm for multiplying and reducing them I get -2. Here is my algorithm for multiplying them written in Java: public static int[] PolMulFun(int a[],int b[],int c[],int N,int M) { for(int k=N-1;k>=0;k--) { c[k]=0; int j=k+1; for(int i=N-1;i>=0;i--) { if(j==N) { j=0; } if(a[i]!=0 && b[j]!=0) { c[k]=(c[k]+(a[i]*b[j]))%M; } j=j+1; } } return c; } It basicall taken in polynomial a and multiplies it b, resturns teh result in c, N specifies the degree of the polynomials+1, in teh example above N=11; and M is the reuction modulo, in teh exampel above 3. Why am I getting -2 and not 1?

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• Progress Bar design patterns?

  - by shoosh

  The application I'm writing performs a length algorithm which usually takes a few minutes to finish. During this time I'd like to show the user a progress bar which indicates how much of the algorithm is done as precisely as possible. The algorithm is divided into several steps, each with its own typical timing. For instance- initialization (500 milli-sec) reading inputs (5 sec) step 1 (30 sec) step 2 (3 minutes) writing outputs (7 sec) shutting down (10 milli-sec) Each step can report its progress quite easily by setting the range its working on, say [0 to 150] and then reporting the value it completed in its main loop. What I currently have set up is a scheme of nested progress monitors which form a sort of implicit tree of progress reporting. All progress monitors inherit from an interface IProgressMonitor: class IProgressMonitor { public: void setRange(int from, int to) = 0; void setValue(int v) = 0; }; The root of the tree is the ProgressMonitor which is connected to the actual GUI interface: class GUIBarProgressMonitor : public IProgressMonitor { GUIBarProgressMonitor(ProgressBarWidget *); }; Any other node in the tree are monitors which take control of a piece of the parent progress: class SubProgressMonitor : public IProgressMonitor { SubProgressMonitor(IProgressMonitor *parent, int parentFrom, int parentLength) ... }; A SubProgressMonitor takes control of the range [parentFrom, parentFrom+parentLength] of its parent. With this scheme I am able to statically divide the top level progress according to the expected relative portion of each step in the global timing. Each step can then be further subdivided into pieces etc' The main disadvantage of this is that the division is static and it gets painful to make changes according to variables which are discovered at run time. So the question: are there any known design patterns for progress monitoring which solve this issue?

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• Updating a Minimum spanning tree when a new edge is inserted

  - by Lynette

  Hello, I've been presented the following problem in University: Let G = (V, E) be an (undirected) graph with costs ce = 0 on the edges e € E. Assume you are given a minimum-cost spanning tree T in G. Now assume that a new edge is added to G, connecting two nodes v, tv € V with cost c. a) Give an efficient algorithm to test if T remains the minimum-cost spanning tree with the new edge added to G (but not to the tree T). Make your algorithm run in time O(|E|). Can you do it in O(|V|) time? Please note any assumptions you make about what data structure is used to represent the tree T and the graph G. b)Suppose T is no longer the minimum-cost spanning tree. Give a linear-time algorithm (time O(|E|)) to update the tree T to the new minimum-cost spanning tree. This is the solution I found: Let e1=(a,b) the new edge added Find in T the shortest path from a to b (BFS) if e1 is the most expensive edge in the cycle then T remains the MST else T is not the MST It seems to work but i can easily make this run in O(|V|) time, while the problem asks O(|E|) time. Am i missing something? By the way we are authorized to ask for help from anyone so I'm not cheating :D Thanks in advance

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• Python MD5 Hash Faster Calculation

  - by balgan

  Hi everyone. I will try my best to explain my problem and my line of thought on how I think I can solve it. I use this code for root, dirs, files in os.walk(downloaddir): for infile in files: f = open(os.path.join(root,infile),'rb') filehash = hashlib.md5() while True: data = f.read(10240) if len(data) == 0: break filehash.update(data) print "FILENAME: " , infile print "FILE HASH: " , filehash.hexdigest() and using start = time.time() elapsed = time.time() - start I measure how long it takes to calculate an hash. Pointing my code to a file with 653megs this is the result: root@Mars:/home/tiago# python algorithm-timer.py FILENAME: freebsd.iso FILE HASH: ace0afedfa7c6e0ad12c77b6652b02ab 12.624 root@Mars:/home/tiago# python algorithm-timer.py FILENAME: freebsd.iso FILE HASH: ace0afedfa7c6e0ad12c77b6652b02ab 12.373 root@Mars:/home/tiago# python algorithm-timer.py FILENAME: freebsd.iso FILE HASH: ace0afedfa7c6e0ad12c77b6652b02ab 12.540 Ok now 12 seconds +- on a 653mb file, my problem is I intend to use this code on a program that will run through multiple files, some of them might be 4/5/6Gb and it will take wayy longer to calculate. What am wondering is if there is a faster way for me to calculate the hash of the file? Maybe by doing some multithreading? I used a another script to check the use of the CPU second by second and I see that my code is only using 1 out of my 2 CPUs and only at 25% max, any way I can change this? Thank you all in advance for the given help.

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• Finding the left-most and right-most points of a list. std::find_if the right way to go?

  - by Tom

  Hi, I have a list of Point objects, (each one with x,y properties) and would like to find the left-most and right-most points. I've been trying to do it with find_if, but i'm not sure its the way to go, because i can't seem to pass a comparator instance. Is find_if the way to go? Seems not. So, is there an algorithm in <algorithm> to achieve this? Thanks in advance. #include <iostream> #include <list> #include <algorithm> using namespace std; typedef struct Point{ float x; float y; } Point; bool left(Point& p1,Point& p2) { return p1.x < p2.x; } int main(){ Point p1 ={-1,0}; Point p2 ={1,0}; Point p3 ={5,0}; Point p4 ={7,0}; list <Point> points; points.push_back(p1); points.push_back(p2); points.push_back(p3); points.push_back(p4); //Should return an interator to p1. find_if(points.begin(),points.end(),left); return 0; }

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• Boost lambda: Invoke method on object

  - by ckarras

  I'm looking at boost::lambda as a way to to make a generic algorithm that can work with any "getter" method of any class. The algorithm is used to detect duplicate values of a property, and I would like for it to work for any property of any class. In C#, I would do something like this: class Dummy { public String GetId() ... public String GetName() ... } IEnumerable<String> FindNonUniqueValues<ClassT> (Func<ClassT,String> propertyGetter) { ... } Example use of the method: var duplicateIds = FindNonUniqueValues<Dummy>(d => d.GetId()); var duplicateNames = FindNonUniqueValues<Dummy>(d => d.GetName()); I can get the for "any class" part to work, using either interfaces or template methods, but have not found yet how to make the "for any method" part work. Is there a way to do something similar to the "d = d.GetId()" lambda in C++ (either with or without Boost)? Alternative, more C++ian solutions to make the algorithm generic are welcome too. I'm using C++/CLI with VS2008, so I can't use C++0x lambdas.

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• Password hashing, salt and storage of hashed values

  - by Jonathan Leffler

  Suppose you were at liberty to decide how hashed passwords were to be stored in a DBMS. Are there obvious weaknesses in a scheme like this one? To create the hash value stored in the DBMS, take: A value that is unique to the DBMS server instance as part of the salt, And the username as a second part of the salt, And create the concatenation of the salt with the actual password, And hash the whole string using the SHA-256 algorithm, And store the result in the DBMS. This would mean that anyone wanting to come up with a collision should have to do the work separately for each user name and each DBMS server instance separately. I'd plan to keep the actual hash mechanism somewhat flexible to allow for the use of the new NIST standard hash algorithm (SHA-3) that is still being worked on. The 'value that is unique to the DBMS server instance' need not be secret - though it wouldn't be divulged casually. The intention is to ensure that if someone uses the same password in different DBMS server instances, the recorded hashes would be different. Likewise, the user name would not be secret - just the password proper. Would there be any advantage to having the password first and the user name and 'unique value' second, or any other permutation of the three sources of data? Or what about interleaving the strings? Do I need to add (and record) a random salt value (per password) as well as the information above? (Advantage: the user can re-use a password and still, probably, get a different hash recorded in the database. Disadvantage: the salt has to be recorded. I suspect the advantage considerably outweighs the disadvantage.) There are quite a lot of related SO questions - this list is unlikely to be comprehensive: Encrypting/Hashing plain text passwords in database Secure hash and salt for PHP passwords The necessity of hiding the salt for a hash Clients-side MD5 hash with time salt Simple password encryption Salt generation and Open Source software I think that the answers to these questions support my algorithm (though if you simply use a random salt, then the 'unique value per server' and username components are less important).

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• Deterministic and non uniform long string generation from seed

  - by Limonup

  I had this weird idea for an encryption that I wanted to try out, it may be bad, and it may have done before, but I'm just doing it for fun. The short version of the question is: Is it possible to generate a long, deterministic and non-uniformly distributed string/sequence of numbers from a small seed? Long(er) version: I was thinking to encrypt a text by changing encoding. The new encoding would be generated via Huffman algorithm. To work well, the Huffman algorithm would need a fairly long text with non uniform distribution. Then characters can have different bit-lengths which would be the primary strength of this encryption. The problem is that its impractical to enter in/remember a long text each time you want to decrypt the text. So I was wondering if it was possible to generate a text from password seed? It doesn't matter what the text is, as long as it has non uniform distribution of characters and that the exact same sequence can be recreated each time you give it the same seed. Preferably, are there any functions/extensions in Python that can do this? EDIT: To expand on the "strength" of varying bit length: if I have a string "test", ASCII values 116, 101, 115, 116, which gives bit values of 1110100 1100101 1110011 1110100 Then, say my Huffman algorithm generates encoding like t = 101 e = 1100111 s = 10001 The final string is 101 1100111 10001 101, if we encode this back to ASCII, we get 1011100 1111000 1101000, which is 3 entirely different characters. Obviously its impossible to perform any kind of frequency analysis or something like that on this.

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• Which design pattern is most appropriate?

  - by Anon

  Hello, I want to create a class that can use one of four algorithms (and the algorithm to use is only known at run-time). I was thinking that the Strategy design pattern sounds appropriate, but my problem is that each algorithm requires slightly different parameters. Would it be a bad design to use strategy, but pass in the relevant parameters into the constructor?. Here is an example (for simplicity, let's say there are only two possible algorithms) ... class Foo { private: // At run-time the correct algorithm is used, e.g. a = new Algorithm1(1); AlgorithmInterface* a; }; class AlgorithmInterface { public: virtual void DoSomething = 0; }; class Algorithm1 : public AlgorithmInterface { public: Algorithm1( int i ) : value(i) {} virtual void DoSomething(){ // Does something with int value }; int value; }; class Algorithm2 : public AlgorithmInterface { public: Algorithm2( bool b ) : value(b) {} virtual void DoSomething(){ // Do something with bool value }; bool value; };

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• NHibernate correct way to reattach cached entity to different session

  - by Chris Marisic

  I'm using NHibernate to query a list of objects from my database. After I get the list of objects over them I iterate over the list of objects and apply a distance approximation algorithm to find the nearest object. I consider this function of getting the list of objects and apply the algorithm over them to be a heavy operation so I cache the object which I find from the algorithm in HttpRuntime.Cache. After this point whenever I'm given the supplied input again I can just directly pull the object from Cache instead of having to hit the database and traverse the list. My object is a complex object that has collections attached to it, inside the query where I return the full list of objects I don't bring back any of the sub collections eagerly so when I read my cached object I need lazy loading to work correctly to be able to display the object fully. Originally I tried using this to re-associate my cached object back to a new session _session.Lock(obj, LockMode.None); However when accessing the page concurrently from another instance I get the error Illegal attempt to associate a collection with two open sessions I then tried something different with _session.Merge(obj); However watching the output of this in NHProf shows that it is deleting and re-associating my object's contained collections with my object, which is not what I want although it seems to work fine. What is the correct way to do this? Neither of these seem to be right.

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• Calculating distance from latitude, longitude and height using a geocentric co-ordinate system

  - by Sarge

  I've implemented this method in Javascript and I'm roughly 2.5% out and I'd like to understand why. My input data is an array of points represented as latitude, longitude and the height above the WGS84 ellipsoid. These points are taken from data collected from a wrist-mounted GPS device during a marathon race. My algorithm was to convert each point to cartesian geocentric co-ordinates and then compute the Euclidean distance (c.f Pythagoras). Cartesian geocentric is also known as Earth Centred Earth Fixed. i.e. it's an X, Y, Z co-ordinate system which rotates with the earth. My test data was the data from a marathon and so the distance should be very close to 42.26km. However, the distance comes to about 43.4km. I've tried various approaches and nothing changes the result by more than a metre. e.g. I replaced the height data with data from the NASA SRTM mission, I've set the height to zero, etc. Using Google, I found two points in the literature where lat, lon, height had been transformed and my transformation algorithm is matching. What could explain this? Am I expecting too much from Javascript's double representation? (The X, Y, Z numbers are very big but the differences between two points is very small). My alternative is to move to computing the geodesic across the WGS84 ellipsoid using Vincenty's algorithm (or similar) and then calculating the Euclidean distance with the two heights but this seems inaccurate. Thanks in advance for your help!

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• CakePHP: Interaction between different files/classes

  - by Alexx Hardt

  Hey, I'm cloning a commercial student management system. Students use the frontend to apply for lectures, uni staff can modify events (time, room, etc). The core of the app will be the algortihm which distributes the seats to students. I already asked about it here: How to implement a seat distribution algorithm for uni lectures Now, I found a class for that algorithm here: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/file/10779.html I put the 'class GA' into app/vendors. I need to write a 'class Solution', which represents one object (a child, and later a parent for the evolutionary process). I'll also have to write functions mutate(), crossover() and fitness(). fitness calculates a score of a solution, based on if there are overbooked courses etc; crossover() is the crazy monkey sex function which produces a child from two parents, and mutate() modifies a child after crossover. Now, the fitness()-function needs to access a few related models, and their find()-functions. It evaluates a solution's fitness by checking e.g. if there are overbooked courses, or unfulfilled wishes, and penalizes that. Where would I put the ga.php, solution.php and the three functions? ga.php has to access the functions, but the functions have to access the models. I also don't want to call any App::import()'s from within the fitness()-function, because it gets called many thousand times when the algorithm runs. Hope someone can help me. Thanks in advance =)

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