Penultimate donut post: the function compute() is safe

Do two jobs, and do them well

In the previous post, I used the command:

$ cat log? | grep \N " | sort | uniq 

This may be an inefficient way to get a list of unique lines containing "N ". The command sort does not know that it is sending its results to uniq so it has to keep all duplicates in memory or at least keep a count for each of them. As pointed out by my colleague Benjamin Monate you can make sort's job easier by telling it directly that you are only interested in unique lines. The option is sort -u. This can only make sort's job simpler even if it has an optimization for dealing with duplicate lines efficiently.

Update on the donut verification

The computations for the remaining difficult 5% of the search space are now finished. I was hoping not to have to do a third pass so I split each side of the examined subcube in 4. In other words I divided each subcube in 4⁴ or 256 subsubcubes. A little birdie told me that splitting each side in two wouldn't be sufficient. That birdie had been wrong before but this time it was absolutely sure— it got the tip straight from the subcube's mouth.

I have kept the entire logs for this second pass since I didn't know yet whether I would need the additional information they contain. I would have needed them if a third pass had been necessary but it won't be. It is now official: function compute() is safe for all arguments between -3.25 and 3.25.

Now I must write the concluding post quickly because the full logs are taking 85GB on our computations server.