simulator (Re: [Icfp04-discuss] three liberal arts)

[Alan Schmitt]

* Jed Davis (jdev+icfp at xlerb.net) wrote:
> Eijiro Sumii <sumii at saul.cis.upenn.edu> writes:
> 
> > Just for information (and fun:-)...
> >
> > There are _many_ different ways to implement an ant simulator.  For
> > example, one could compile ant code into C and thereby remove
> > interpretive overheads.
> 
> I'd thought of that, although I have to wonder how much improvement it
> gives.  Certainly, saving the switch (and how are those implemented,
> nowadays?) on the ant-opcode, and on the parameters for Sense would be
> nice...  but how nice?  And what of locality of reference in the
> compiled code, especially for the huge 8000-insn ants?  
> 

We tried ant compilation here (one of the too many things we did instead 
of doing ant strategy ;-) ), and we found that it was not that 
impressive (something around a 10% gain for a 1.4 s run on a 1.7 GHz 
machine).

By the way, I'd be curious to know what people think their mistake was 
during the contest (if they think they did a mistake). In our team, we 
lost a lot of time trying to build a framework to test many many ants 
and store the results. And we did not think hard enough about what the 
ants would be able to do (I was convinced until pretty late that the 
ants would be stupid ... but the examples seen on the list cleary show 
it's not the case).

In any case it was a lot of fun. I just wish I could stop thinking about 
it now ;-)

Alan Schmitt

-- 
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.
.O.
..O
OOO
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/icfp04-discuss/attachments/20040609/48fc6005/attachment.bin