Re: [gnugo-devel] engine/influence.c (and DFA)

[Arend Bayer]

On 3 Sep 2002, Dave Denholm wrote:

> Unrolling the loop
> reduced the time from 6 minutes to 5 minutes 37 seconds. (I had been
> wondering whether the measured speedup had been due to it doing less
> work, rather than due to the unrolling.)

What I've been wondering: Shouldn't we expect a modern compiler do do the
loop unrolling himself?


> On subject of testing speedups : perhaps it would be useful to have a variant 
> on
> twogtp which spawns two engines, but rather than playing them
> against each other, sets the same seed and asks them to generate moves. It 
> verifies
> that they play identically at all times. This would make it easier to automate
> testing changes which are intended to be speedups only.
>
> Or just a shell script which runs with -b and a few different seeds.

For testing, I usually do
gnugo --mode gtp <strategy.tst -t -d<what-ever-may-have-changed> >log 2>&1
gnugo-modidfied --mode gtp <strategy.tst -t -d<what-ever-may-have-changed> 
>log-modified 2>&1
diff log log-modified

Much more accurate at finding mistakes than just comparing the moves.
(Of course, not as accurate at measuring the speedup.)


Arend