Originally Posted by
RChung
SNIP
Yeah, Coggan's original presentation used the former formulation to explain the underlying logic. When he explains using the computationally simpler version, people question the IF^2 term. When he explains using the longer heuristic, people point out the IF^2 form.
Well, that is interesting. When I first encountered these equations it occurred to me "what is this - it is like someone is trying to hide what this really is". Guess I was (kind of) right.
Fascinating and it reminds of something that I did back in my engineering days. I was dealing with electronic circuit delays and we had good data on nominal performance, but the worst case performance was nebulous (and my problem). So for each circuit configuration I had to come up with a 'worst case factor' which you multiplied against the nominal performance to get worst case performance. Do to various correlation things, one factor came out to pretty much EXACTLY 1.0. If I published (to the engineers in our company) a factor of 1.0, I would have spent the rest of my life explaining to every damn one of them why worst case was not worse than nominal. So I just fudged it and published 1.05 and never got a 'call back'.
Thanks for the info.
dave