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James Gregory 2013-12-30 12:25:34 +11:00
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<P>Assembly language optimization is pattern matching on a local scale. Frankly, it&#146;s also the sort of boring, brute-force work that people are lousy at; compilers could out-optimize you at this level with one pass tied behind their back <I>if</I> they knew as much about the code you&#146;re writing as you do, which they don&#146;t.</P>
<TABLE WIDTH="100%"><TD WIDTH="5%" VALIGN="TOP"><IMG SRC="images/10-03i.jpg"><TD WIDTH="95%"><SMALL><I>Design optimization&#151;conceptual breakthroughs in understanding the relationships between the needs of an application, the nature of the data the application works with, and what the computer can do&#151;is global pattern matching.</I></SMALL>
<TABLE WIDTH="100%"><TD WIDTH="5%" VALIGN="TOP"><IMG SRC="images/i.jpg"><TD WIDTH="95%"><SMALL><I>Design optimization&#151;conceptual breakthroughs in understanding the relationships between the needs of an application, the nature of the data the application works with, and what the computer can do&#151;is global pattern matching.</I></SMALL>
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<P>Computers are <I>much</I> worse at that sort of pattern matching than humans; computers have no way to integrate vast amounts of disparate information, much of it only vaguely defined or subject to change. People, oddly enough, are <I>better</I> at global optimization than at local optimization. For one thing, it&#146;s more interesting. For another, it&#146;s complex and imprecise enough to allow intuition and inspiration, two vastly underrated programming tools, to come to the fore. And, as I pointed out earlier, people tend to perform instantaneous solutions to even the most complex problems, while computers bog down in geometrically or exponentially increasing execution times. Oh, it may take days or weeks for a person to absorb enough information to be able to reach a solution, and the solution may only be near-optimal&#151;but the solution itself (or, at least, each of the pieces of the solution) arrives in a flash.</P>
<P>Those flashes are your programming pattern matcher doing its job. <I>Your</I> job is to give your pattern matcher the opportunity to get to know each problem and run through it two or three times, from different angles, to see what unexpected solutions it can come up with.</P>