Category Archives: Math

What We Talk About When We Talk About Performance

Posted on February 4, 2018 by brucedawson

TL;DR – the phrase “90% faster” is interpreted by people in two different ways: 90% less time The speed (ops/sec or km/h) is 90% greater I strongly prefer #2 but due to the ambiguity this phrase should never be used. … Continue reading →

Posted in Math, Performance, Rants | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

Out of Order Benefits

Posted on October 25, 2012 by brucedawson

A few months ago I wrote about some experiments to see how fast modern CPUs are at doing high-precision math such as is used in cryptography and high-precision fractal calculations. I recently read an article that claimed that out-of-order processors … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Fractal eXtreme, now cheaper

Posted on September 4, 2012 by brucedawson

As an experiment Fractal eXtreme is now just $9.95. The latest version has a few bug fixes and performance improvements, is a free update to all existing users, and is cheap like borscht.

Posted in Fractals, Math | Tagged | 24 Comments

Jetpacks and flying cars

Posted on July 28, 2012 by brucedawson

For the last n+1 years the geek literati have been waiting for two things: jetpacks, and flying cars. Flying cars are still an impractical dream, but jetpacks are here. However, nobody seems to care. Video is linked below.

Posted in Fun, Math | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Myth: Mythbusters Can Do Math

Posted on June 11, 2012 by brucedawson

Busted! Once again, the Mythbusters have shown that they are careless with basic mathematics. They have shown that they can’t reliably calculate percentages, which makes me worry about all of other math that they do. They described dimpled golf balls … Continue reading →

Posted in Math | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Fractal and Crypto Performance

Posted on March 28, 2012 by brucedawson

There was some recent interest in what type of computer would run Fractal eXtreme’s deep zoom calculations fastest (and cheapest) so I wrote a benchmarking tool that isolates the inner calculations for more accurate measurements and arranged to have it … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 24 Comments

Population Estimation Through Murder Statistics

Posted on March 23, 2012 by brucedawson

For reasons that I no longer remember I found myself looking at the murder rate page on Wikipedia. Looking at some of the patterns in a few of the safer countries I realized that I could estimate their populations based … Continue reading →

Posted in Math | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

They sure look equal…

Posted on February 11, 2012 by brucedawson

This is a special bonus extra post in my floating-point series, ranting about an issue that has been a problem for years. Some debuggers don’t display floats with enough precision.

Posted in Floating Point, Math, Programming | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

Tricks With the Floating-Point Format

Posted on January 11, 2012 by brucedawson

Years ago I wrote an article about how to do epsilon floating-point comparisons by using integer comparisons. That article has been quite popular (it is frequently cited, and the code samples have been used by a number of companies) and … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Floating Point, Math, Programming | 28 Comments

Faster Fractals Again

Posted on November 28, 2011 by brucedawson

I was calculating a long fractal zoom movie with Fractal eXtreme when I noticed that one of the phases seemed to be taking too long on my four-core eight-thread processor. A bit of investigation showed that this phase was effectively … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | 6 Comments