Following on from my experiments in timing the algorithms in part 9 of this series, I was curious as to why my code for Wilson’s algorithm took so much longer than the code for the Aldous-Broder algorithm. Jamis Buck (the author of the book this is all based on) was foolish enough to leave his email address on his blog, inviting people like me to ask him questions! I asked if he had seen anything like this difference. Turns out he hadn’t actually tried timing them, so couldn’t comment. This got me curious, so I pulled up his code, and started searching around to find out how to time code in Ruby. This turned out to be fairly simple (as it should), giving me the following… This gave me 10 numbers, which enabled me to calculate an average, as well as check on the variation (standard deviation for the statistical…
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