[Haskell-cafe] New Benchmark Under Review: Magic Squares

[Brent Fulgham]

We recently began considering another benchmark for the shootout,  
namely a Magic Square via best-first search.  This is fairly  
inefficient, and we may need to shift to another approach due to the  
extremely large times required to find a solution for larger squares.

I thought the Haskell community might be interested in the  
performance we have measured so far (see "http:// 
shootout.alioth.debian.org/sandbox/fulldata.php? 
test=magicsquares&p1=java-0&p2=javaclient-0&p3=ghc-0&p4=psyco-0"

Interestingly, Java actually beats the tar out of GHC and Python for  
N=5x5 (and I assume higher, though this already takes on the order of  
2 hours to solve on the benchmark machine).  Memory use in GHC stays  
nice and low, but the time to find the result rapidly grows.

I was hoping for an order of magnitude increase with each increase in  
N, but discovered that it is more like an exponential...

Thanks,

-Brent