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)