computer-science

How do I determine the square root of a floating point number? Is the Newton-Raphson method a good way? I have no hardware square root either. I also have no hardware divide (but I have implemented floating point divide). If possible, I would prefer to reduce the number of divides as much as possible since they are so expensive. Also, what should be the initial guess to reduce the total number of iterations??? Thank you so much! When you use Newton-Raphson to compute a square-root, you actually want to use the iteration to find the reciprocal square root (after which you can simply multiply by

I was looking at some code and saw an out of context comment about 'hysteresis.' I think I have figured out what the code does so my question doesn't involve anything specific. I simply do not understand what the term means or how it is applicable in programming. I looked around and saw some mathmatic definitions but would like some more information. From what I can tell Hysteresis has something to do with predicting or assuming a given state for X based on what has happened to X in the past? Hysteresis characterizes a system whose behavior (output) does not only depend on its input at time t

What genetic-programming library, regardless of language, has the most active community and is the most well developed? It's hard to tell, frankly. ParadisEO seems to be very active, and is a pretty large library encompassing various metaheuristics besides GP. Note that it is a superset of the EO library. OpenBEAGLE is nice, but it hasn't been updated since 2007. Watchmaker is very good and active right now, but it only has a proof of concept implementation of GP for now. There's a plethora of libraries out there and rather hard to tell which is the best one. And it's not very hard to roll

In a multitasking operating system context, sometimes you hear the term round-robin scheduling. What does it refer to? What other kind of scheduling is there? Round Robin Scheduling If you are a host in a party of 100 guests, round-robin scheduling would mean that you spend 1 minute (a fixed amount) per guest. You go through each guest one-by-one, and after 100 minutes, you would have spent 1 minute with each guest. More on Wikipedia . There are many other types of scheduling, such as priority-based (i.e. most important people first), first-come-first-serve, earliest-deadline-first (i.e.