[Shootout-list] logarithmic scoring system

[Bengt Kleberg]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
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> Why do you want to determine by hand, or by multiple runs, what would be
> a natural consequence of an additive system?  Most mathematicians set
> the origin at zero for a reason, you know.  Whatever a test gets done in
> 60 seconds would be whatever it gets done.
> 

''x per second'' is much more difficult to measure than ''time to do x''

one way would be to increase n for, say, the ack test until it takes one 
second. this would be a very high penalty for the languages that take 
one second to start. that is solved by using more than one second.

it would also take a long time to run all tests on all languages since 
we are using trial-and-error to find the right n for each language. the 
nice thing is that we would not have to rerun any test unless the 
language/operating system/hardware changed.

the alternative would be to run te test with a very high n, and 
interrupt the test after a certain time. this seems error prone to me, 
as the language would have to be interrupted in a polite manner. 
otherwise we would loose the value we want from the test (the x times it 
managed to do the test). moreover, some test are not possible to do this 
way (reverse).

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> 
> 
> Why do you want to spend time redesigning and manually futzing things?

i do not want to. i would prefer not to redesign. but i admit the 
possibility of errors.


bengt