Hi, I was just looking at some timings for trac 12149, and it occurred to me that our "timeout" command may be fine for programmers, but for us mathematicians surely we want something that gives a better measure of the distribution of timings? Wouldn't it be nice to get both the mean and standard deviation of the trials, rather than just the mean?
I'm guessing I'm not the first person to think of this, so maybe one of the people reading this has already written some code for this? I'm curious what people would think about the timeit command being improved a bit as follows: (1) by default it returns/displays the mean and standard deviation. This way we can more easily compare timings between different runs or different code. If the standard deviation were "10 ms", say, and two timings differ by 2 ms, we know that it means little. (2) Timeit would return an object that prints itself as in 1. But it would also have a plot_histogram method, which would return a histogram plot of all the timings from the runs. Also, there would be methods on this object to return the timing as a float in seconds, etc. It could also give access to both wall and cputimes, since both are very relevant for Sage (which uses pexpect sometimes). Thoughts? Are there any experts out there in code benchmarking done from a more mathematically sophisticated perspective than just one number? It's entirely possible I'm making some stupid mistake in suggesting the above. William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
