PSU CS Department
Experimental Safety Guidelines

It sounds ludicrous to be talking about safety in connection with computing experiments, right? After all, what could happen? No experiment you are likely to run will have any interesting effect whatsoever on the physical world.

Of course, there's a social world. What you want to avoid is running an important department computer out of CPU overnight, and thus getting thwacked senseless by your own classmates. This is what we mean by ``experimental safety.''

Thus, please follow these helpful suggestions when conducting compute-intensive experiments:

Remember the golden rule of combinatorial search: better algorithms help, more CPU does not. Ten times the CPU gets you one or two nodes deeper in the tree: this kind of gain is not worth making everyone's life miserable, including your own.


Last Modified: 2000/6/13
Bart Massey <bart@cs.pdx.edu>