Remove colour attributes from body and strip most of the font tags out
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James Gregory
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362 changed files with 1632 additions and 1706 deletions
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10-01.html
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10-01.html
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<!--CHAPTER=10//-->
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<!--PAGES=190-193//-->
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<!--UNASSIGNED1//-->
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<!--UNASSIGNED2//--></HEAD><BODY LINK=#0000FF ALINK=#000099 VLINK=#0000FF BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF>
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<!--UNASSIGNED2//--></HEAD><body>
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<CENTER>
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<TABLE BORDER>
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</TABLE>
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</CENTER>
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<P><BR></P>
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<H2><A NAME="Heading1"></A><FONT COLOR="#000077">Chapter 10<BR>Patient Coding, Faster Code
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</FONT></H2>
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<H3><A NAME="Heading2"></A><FONT COLOR="#000077">How Working Quickly Can Bring Execution to a Crawl</FONT></H3>
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<H2><A NAME="Heading1"></A>Chapter 10<BR>Patient Coding, Faster Code</H2>
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<H3><A NAME="Heading2"></A>How Working Quickly Can Bring Execution to a Crawl</H3>
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<P>My grandfather does <I>The New York Times</I> crossword puzzle every Sunday. In ink. With nary a blemish.</P>
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<P>The relevance of which will become apparent in a trice.</P>
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<P>What my grandfather is, is a pattern matcher <I>par excellence</I>. You’re a pattern matcher, too. So am I. We can’t help it; it comes with the territory. Try focusing on text and not reading it. Can’t do it. Can you hear the voice of someone you know and not recognize it? I can’t. And how in the Nine Billion Names of God is it that we’re capable of instantly recognizing one face out of the thousands we’ve seen in our lifetimes—even years later, from a different angle and in different light? Although we take them for granted, our pattern-matching capabilities are surely a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes.</P>
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</TABLE>
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<P>In this chapter, I’m going to walk you through a simple but illustrative case history that nicely points up the wisdom of delaying gratification when faced with programming problems, so that your mind has time to chew on the problems from other angles. The alternative solutions you find by doing this may seem obvious, once you’ve come up with them. They may not even differ greatly from your initial solutions. Often, however, they will be much better—and you’ll never even have the chance to decide whether they’re better or not if you take the first thing that comes into your head and run with it.
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</P>
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<H4 ALIGN="LEFT"><A NAME="Heading3"></A><FONT COLOR="#000077">The Case for Delayed Gratification</FONT></H4>
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<H4 ALIGN="LEFT"><A NAME="Heading3"></A>The Case for Delayed Gratification</H4>
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<P>Once upon a time, I set out to read <I>Algorithms</I>, by Robert Sedgewick (Addison-Wesley), which turned out to be a wonderful, stimulating, and most useful book, one that I recommend highly. My story, however, involves only what happened in the first 12 pages, for it was in those pages that Sedgewick discussed Euclid’s algorithm.</P>
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<P>Euclid’s algorithm (discovered by Euclid, of Euclidean geometry fame, a very long time ago, way back when computers still used core memory) is a straightforward algorithm that solves one of the simplest problems imaginable: finding the greatest common integer divisor (GCD) of two positive integers. Sedgewick points out that this is useful for reducing a fraction to its lowest terms. I’m sure it’s useful for other things, as well, although none spring to mind. (A long time ago, I wrote an article about optimizing a bit of code that wasn’t even vaguely time-critical, and got swamped with letters telling me so. I knew it wasn’t time-critical; it was just a good example. So for now, close your eyes and <I>imagine</I> that finding the GCD is not only necessary but must also be done as quickly as possible, because it’s perfect for the point I want to make here and now. Okay?)</P>
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<P>The problem at hand, then, is simply this: Find the largest integer value that evenly divides two arbitrary positive integers. That’s all there is to it. So warm up your pattern matchers...and go!</P>
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<H3><A NAME="Heading4"></A><FONT COLOR="#000077">The Brute-Force Syndrome</FONT></H3>
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<H3><A NAME="Heading4"></A>The Brute-Force Syndrome</H3>
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<P>I have a funny feeling that you’d already figured out how to find the GCD before I even said “go.” That’s what I did when reading <I>Algorithms;</I> before I read another word, I had to figure it out for myself. Programmers are like that; give them a problem and their eyes immediately glaze over as they try to solve it before you’ve even shut your mouth. That sort of instant response can certainly be impressive, but it can backfire, too, as it did in my case.</P>
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<P>You see, I fell victim to a common programming pitfall, the “brute-force” syndrome. The basis of this syndrome is that there are many problems that have obvious, brute-force solutions—with one small drawback. The drawback is that if you were to try to apply a brute-force solution by hand—that is, work a single problem out with pencil and paper or a calculator—it would generally require that you have the patience and discipline to work on the problem for approximately seven hundred years, not counting eating and sleeping, in order to get an answer. Finding all the prime numbers less than 1,000,000 is a good example; just divide each number up to 1,000,000 by every lesser number, and see what’s left standing. For most of the history of humankind, people were forced to think of cleverer solutions, such as the Sieve of Eratosthenes (we’d have been in big trouble if the ancient Greeks had had computers), mainly because after about five minutes of brute force-type work, people’s attention gets diverted to other important matters, such as how far a paper airplane will fly from a second-story window.</P><P><BR></P>
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<CENTER>
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<hr width="90%" size="1" noshade>
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<div align="center">
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<font face="Verdana,sans-serif" size="1">Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash</font>
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Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash
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</div>
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