3 ms·

Cool result. But: "Was this worth it?" - looking at the last step of optimisation, it looks like that would be the hardest to do correctly without bugs, hardes

• nkurz 12y ago
  > Was it really worth, or just fun? That's the question for just about everything, isn't it? This was unpaid to help with her PhD thesis. Maybe that makes it "not worth it" from the start? Does the lack of financial incentive make "for fun" the only applicable answer? The project models the correlation between air quality in school classrooms and student absence rates. Maybe twice as fast means that she can do twice as many runs in the same amount of time, and produce results that are accurate to one decimal place more? She'd probably graduate in either case, and the chances that someone will act differently based on the difference in the results is very low. For that matter, the chance that someone will act at all based on results published in a PhD thesis is very low. Had someone been paying me by the hour to optimize for them, perhaps that would make it worth it to me but not to them? Is it just for fun if you are learning details and gaining experience that you can apply elsewhere? At what point does further learning become superfluous? I've never figured these out. As it is, I learn more and more about optimizing code, my social capital among friends increases, and my financial state grows worse and worse.