Empirical Measures

From

Empirical analysis of a program is a factual enquiry carried out by simply recording what is observed or measured from actual run-time behavior of a program. Two of the more common empirical measures of program behavior are actual clock time and operations counting. Measuring clock time usually involves adding calls to the system clock at the begining and end of the process or function that you wish to measure. Measuring operations counting commonly include counting comparisons, counting assignments (memory writes), and counting the number of times the inner most code in a loop is executed.

Asymtotic measures are "analytical" meaning that we look at the algorithm and deduce it's behavior. Empirical measures are situational observations; we measure real behavior for a specific situation. They are complimentary to each other; empirical measures should validate our analytical view of program behavior.

Empirical measurement of time

Example using psuedocode to be written

Empirical counting of operations

Example using psuedocode to be written