help-octave
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: fast poisson variates


From: David Bateman
Subject: Re: fast poisson variates
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:38:43 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.4.1 (Windows/20051006)

John W. Eaton wrote:
On 16-Mar-2006, Michael Creel wrote:

| This sort of duplicated functionality, with the better version being in | o-f rather than in Octave itself is no doubt a source of confusion for | new users. and for more experienced users with bad memories. :-)

Yes, and we are mostly trying to eliminate the overlap.  There are
ways you can help to make this happen faster.  Complaining about the
problem here is not really one of them.

| Is the o-f version of rand in 2.9.4? I can't remember!

If the Octave Forge version of rand were simply faster but produced
exactly the same results as the current rand function in Octave, and
the code was acceptable from a maintenance standpoint (not sure, I
haven't looked, but want you to understand that speed, number of
features, and compatibility are not the only criteria) then it would
be a no-brainer to include it.  But it changes the behavior, and some
people like to be able to reproduce their results for "random"
simulations.  So we need a reasonable way to include the new function
while still.  OTOH, since 2.9.x is breaking a number of other backward
compatibility things, maybe I should not care too much about this one
particular function.


I think I suggested this before, but why not the matlab solution of using the new generators by default and if the "state" keyword is used, and use the old generators if the "seed" keyword is used. This allows old code where the user forced the seed to continue to generate the old sequence, but new code, or code where the user doesn't care about the sequence to benefit from the improved generators..

Regards
David



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]