[Haskell-cafe] numeric minimization in Haskell

Chad Scherrer chad.scherrer at gmail.com
Thu Mar 1 14:17:14 EST 2007


David Roundy wrote:
> It seems like GSLHaskell is an awfully big stick, when all you need are
> scalar multiply and vector addition.  Of course, we don't know what
> functions he wants to minimize, but in the absence of any need for GSL
> functions, I don't see a good reason for it.

The function is just a linear combination of sines and cosines. No
need for GSL for that.

> I see that GSLHaskell has a binding to a conjugate gradients minimizer, but
> it's not useful for any hard problems (it stores the trajectory, which
> defeats the purpose of using conjugate gradients), and can only be very,
> very slow.

I had been throwing the trajectory away without any more thought, but
I suppose it would slow things down quite a bit.

> >From the API alone it cannot be efficient.  Code that is written by people
> who obviously either don't know or don't care about efficiency is just not
> in general a good idea.  I don't know what you use GSLHaskell for in your
> work, but I hope you don't use it for conjugate gradients, or only use it
> on easy problems.

I agree, given the API it seems like it could be very nice for
visualizing how CG works, but it does seem to rule out high
performance.

> --
> David Roundy
> Department of Physics
> Oregon State University

Chad Scherrer


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list