Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!babbage!reiter From: reiter@babbage.harvard.edu (Ehud Reiter) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: BENCHMARKS AND LIPS Message-ID: <706@husc6.harvard.edu> Date: 28 Nov 88 22:14:48 GMT References: <1740MLWLG@CUNYVM> Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu Reply-To: reiter@harvard.UUCP (Ehud Reiter) Organization: Aiken Computation Lab Harvard, Cambridge, MA Lines: 20 In article <1740MLWLG@CUNYVM> MLWLG@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes: >I WOULD LIKE INFORMATION ON MEASURING THE LIPS OF A SYSTEM, I.E., >LOGICAL INFERENCES PER SECOND From a technical point of view, "LIPS" is a term used by PROLOG types to refer to the number of unifications per second their systems can perform when running a trivial program such as naive reverse. See, for example, Sterling&Shapiro, THE ART OF PROLOG, pg 48 and 203. I must say, though, that calling such a unification a "logical inference" ranks pretty high on my list of misleading names. If what you're really interested in is evaluating how good a computer system is at performing symbolic computations, I suggest you start by looking at Gabriel's book on benchmarking LISP, which contains a lot of thoughtful analysis on what is necessary for good performance on symbolic (and numeric) programs written in LISP. Ehud Reiter reiter@harvard (ARPA,BITNET,UUCP) reiter@harvard.harvard.EDU (new ARPA)