Re: binomial_tpe

[James Theiler <jt at lanl dot gov>]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, Brian Gough wrote:

] James Theiler writes:
]  > by the way, i noticed that this is not mentioned
]  > in the revised second edition of the manual; i think
]  > users might like to know that we have a much faster
]  > version available.  (actually, what i think is that
]  > the btpe version should be the standard.)
] 
] Somehow it didn't get documented, sorry. I've added an entry for it
] now and will see about switching to it as the default.
] 

thanks.

there are a few other gsl routines (multinomial, poisson, and
negative_binomial [via poisson]) that call gsl_ran_binomial,
so if we did swap in the faster algorithm, then those would also
be speeded up.

by the way, there is a gsl_ran_poisson_array function (which 
just calls gsl_ran_poisson multiple times).  for consistency's
sake, we might want to either eliminate that one (i don't think 
it's documented), or think about providing *_array functions for
some of the other random number distributions.  particularly for
the discrete distributions, there are often more efficient ways
to compute arrays than through multiple calls of the single 
variate generator.

regards,
jt

-- 
James Theiler            Space and Remote Sensing Sciences
MS-B244, ISR-2, LANL     Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, NM 87545     http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~jt