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Little explorations with HP calculators (no Prime)
03-30-2017, 06:02 PM (This post was last modified: 03-30-2017 06:12 PM by pier4r.)
Post: #79
RE: Little explorations with the HP calculators
(03-30-2017 12:13 PM)Dieter Wrote:  ?!? – *what* is it computing?
Obviously this in not related to the triangle problem we are discussing.

Dieter

No, not to that. So during an international tournament that used the knockout format (you know, teams meet and the winner proceeds) I realized that I could compare tournaments formats somehow. (in short: pick one format as reference, assign team strength, assign variance, do the math, see who wins in the reference tournament and in the other formats)

I did a little search and I found out the swiss tournament format that is pretty neat, but I would have liked to know the statistical properties of this format compared to other formats.

I started a comparison model on paper, using the sharp el 506w as random generator (and also for multiplications). I tested two or three cases and the comparison procedure looked promising.

So I said, ok let's automate the process. But then something else happened and I put the idea aside. The other day I decided to resume the idea from my todos collection (note 1) and since I am also in a period where I'm trying to refresh and expand my user RPL / math knowledge, I decided to implement it on the 50g.

First I did it in a program with nested programs as functions (see also this topic), then I refactored it to use the newly discovered (for me) DIR ... END structure.(Pretty neat)
So I was all excited (and I still am excited) that finally I could manage better a large structure in a single file without clumsy workarounds or multiple tabs.

After some hours of coding and debugging (debugging on the hp 50g, I mean the physical one, takes time. Although I discovered a neat solution thanks to nested programs. See topic mentioned above) finally the code worked for the first tournament format. The round robin. So I did two iterations as tests and I did not detect major flaws (could still be that there are some, I hope not). So I launched 1000 iterations to get the statistics back.

I launched them at 0:56 30.03.2017 , local time. The calculator is still working (it is 20:09 local time).
My fault was that when I launched the two iterations I did not take the execution time, I was eating. So I estimated some hours of work (at the end I still usel userRPL that is heavily emulated) but now I wonder if it will be finished before the weekend. I have to rethink about the role of the hp 50g, maybe it is not so suited for such tasks unless I go for hpgcc and hpgcc-based languages (I will likely skip sysrpl).

I posted the code of the current working version of the tournament simulator in a previous post. I do not know if I missed obvious optimizations but I really thought that a tournament with 16 teams, so 240 pairings (120 pairings twice), repeated 1000 times would not take such amount of time.

It is not the first time that I end up waiting hours/day on the hp 50 though.

(note 1) About todos I do not know what the others do, but I try to collect my interesting todos. I always end up with more ideas than I'm able to process. I'm also pretty sure that there are plenty of people that have the same problem if not bigger (more todos than todos processing ability). Anyway at least I try to collect my todos, could be that someone will do it in the future.

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RE: Little explorations with the HP calculators - pier4r - 03-30-2017 06:02 PM



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