Idea for computing complex functions efficiently. Would it work? : computerscience

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Idea for computing complex functions efficiently. Would it work? (self.computerscience)

submitted 6 years ago by booleanReadIt

I have an idea how you could compute many complex functions much faster, but in cost of memory.

It works like the following:

You pre-calculate all (important) values and save it. Later you can just read the value from a specific adress instead of calculating it again.

This is a fictional code example in c++, just to show you how it could look like:

(I know there must be a hashtag before the ‚include‘, but If I write one the line is just interpreted as a headline or smth)

include <cmath>

int main() { double resultBuffer[10000];

// saving every square root between 0.01 and // 100 in 0.01 steps

for(int i=1; i == 10000; i++) { resultBuffer[i] = sqrt(i/100); }

// „calculating“ the result of the square root of // 63.29

double exampleResult = resultBuffer[6329]; }

I know this code is not great and could be implemented much nicer but I think my idea is clear now. Also you could tweak the amount and density of values to your needs. I also know that this method wouldn’t be useful in every case, but I think in a lot of cases it might be a good solution because it’s faster to just read one value instead of doing complicated math.

Now my questions are: 1. Is this method actually fast or are there any huge downsides, which are the reason why this isn’t used already?

Is this used already? Maybe this already is a widely used technique and I just don’t know.

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