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Efficiency in Mathematica. Part 2

  • To: mathgroup at yoda.ncsa.uiuc.edu
  • Subject: Efficiency in Mathematica. Part 2
  • From: dan at chem.bu.edu (Dan Dill)
  • Date: Thu, 27 Sep 90 12:56:13 -0400

Richard (fateman at ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU) comments that the essence of the speed
up is to have accessed, by whatever means, internal algorithms that take
advantage of the list structure of the data.

David Jacobson (jacobson at cello.hpl.hp.com) sent me a suggestion that may do
just this, in the context of "traditional" subscripting.  By itself David's
method reduced the time from 870 seconds to 9.6 seconds, only about twice as
slow as the fastest scheme I have been able to achieve.

I include David's text below, but the idea is to prevent Mathematica from
knowing it is dealing with a list until all subscripting is done:

	SetAttributes[HoldList,HoldAll];
	ne = 50; nkmat = 18; (* The values were used earlier, too *)
	oldmodhold := Block[{i,j},
        	data = Apply[HoldList, Apply[HoldList,data,4]];
	        For[i = 1, i < ne + 1, i++,
        	        For[j = 1, j < nkmat + 1, j++,
                	        data[[i,2,j,1]] =
                        	        N[Mod[data[[i,2,j,1]], 1], 8]
	                ]
        	];
	        data = Apply[List, Apply[List,data,4]];
	];

	Timing[oldmodhold;]

	Out[137]= {9.58333 Second, Null}

Recall that oldmod differs from the above by the absence of the Apply[...]
before and after the double loop, and the timing is then 870 seconds.

So David must be onto something.  Here's David's message:

-------------------------------

>From jacobson at cello.hpl.hp.com Tue Sep 25 13:45:14 1990
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To: dan at chem.bu.edu (Dan Dill)
Subject: Re: Efficiency in Mathematica
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 20 Sep 90 14:03:52 PDT."
             <9009250532.AA00115 at yoda.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 90 10:46:35 PDT
Message-Id: <25441.654284795 at cello.hpl.hp.com>
From: jacobson at cello.hpl.hp.com
Status: RO

I've also noticed that programs that munge on just part of a list
using subscripting run like molassas.  I'm suspicious that a good part
of the performance problem lies in the subscript operation.  It
evaluates both arguments, and the first is the whole giant list.  So,
in principle, the whole list gets scanned on each reference to see if
there is anything that will evaluate.  Internally, Mathematica seems
to have some bunch of flags to avoid multiple evalutations, but when
you are using subscripting on the left hand side, it may clear the
flag.

I've found that the following trick will often speed such things up by
an order of magnitude.  First do this.

SetAttributes[HoldList,HoldAll]

HoldList will be a "function" that works about like List, except that
it does not evaluate its arguments.

You can easily replace the outmost List with HoldList with

Apply[HoldList,<<<the old list>>>]

Then you do all the subscripting, then let it all evaluate at one swoop
with

Apply[List,<<<the munged HoldList>>>].

In your case, you might want to use HoldList at 2 levels.

If you see fit, I'd appreciate you trying this trick and reporting to
the mathgroup what the performance was.

  -- David Jacobson



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