[Haskell-cafe] Code Review: Sudoku solver

[Chris Kuklewicz]

Daniel Fischer wrote:

> But, lo and behold, I  also tried how plai Array fared in comparison to 
> DiffArray and ... reduced the running time to under ten minutes (a little 
> above for the list version), 5% GC time without -AxM, 1.2% with -A8M.
> 
> And I thought, DiffArrays were supposed to be fast!

No.  DiffArray's are faster for the usual imperative single threaded usage
pattern.  The haddock documentation explains:

> Diff arrays have an immutable interface, but rely on internal updates in
> place to provide fast functional update operator //.
> 
> When the // operator is applied to a diff array, its contents are physically
> updated in place. The old array silently changes its representation without
> changing the visible behavior: it stores a link to the new current array
> along with the difference to be applied to get the old contents.
> 
> So if a diff array is used in a single-threaded style, i.e. after //
> application the old version is no longer used, a'!'i takes O(1) time and a //
> d takes O(length d). Accessing elements of older versions gradually becomes
> slower.
> 
> Updating an array which is not current makes a physical copy. The resulting
> array is unlinked from the old family. So you can obtain a version which is
> guaranteed to be current and thus have fast element access by a // [].

I assume the usage in a Sudoku solver involves a non-trivial amount of
back-tracking.  So as the solver backs up and goes forward again it ends up
being much more work than having used a plain Array.

And as was pointed out by someone else on this list: to be thread safe the
DiffArray uses MVar's (with locking) instead of IOVars.

But I expect the main problem is that a DiffArray is simply not the right
mutable data structure for the job.

I have had the flu this week, so I did not finish cleaning up my port of Knuth's
mutable dancing links based Sudoku solver.  But it uses a much more lightweight
way to alter a mutable data structure both going forward and backwards while
backtracking.  And I can use STRef's to build it, instead of MVars.


-- 
Chris