World: r3wp

I'm building a little example which I think will outperform your 
examples... I'm curious.

I'm just about to test it.

moving the result: make series 0 out of the while loop had a 10 milli 
improvement over 10 iterations.

that might account for the rarity of results.  if your data has a 
lot of occurences, then that number will increase, since your result 
block will grow much more.

You may need to move beyond brute force Terry, and set up a data 
structure to optimize the searching.

There must be a way.

An index is a symbol that represents some value. What I need is to 
add some metadata to that index, and make that searchable.

the goal is a blazing key/value store that's as fast as pulling by 
index
:)

I thought i had it with find/any .. but it doesn't work on blocks

I haven't tried it, but my guess is storing or converting values 
to string to use find/any on will be slower than foreach. as in foreach 
[key value] n [...

and i don't think you can search keys in hash or map! without using 
foreach?

I suppose the while loop with counter, is adding extra burden in 
my examples as well so real world would be faster

nope... since that is 10 ops within hundreds of millions.

The other thing i considered was using pairs! to as a pair of symbols, 
but can't search those either without foreach
ie: [ 23x54 "value 1" 984x2093 "value 2"]

Maxim, the foreach results against strings in your doc is an interesting 
result.

right now, for sparse data, I've got an algorithm that traverses 
5 times faster than your foreach example.  but if its really dense, 
then it will be slower.

I'm thinking 10,000,000 values min, and preferably to max memory

10 x 10 million items, with a single value within the block...  

0:00:00.234  using a 1.5GHz laptop.

vs: 
0:00:01.594 for your foreach example.

plus record-size is variable, and is supplied as a parameter to the 
function.

not bad.. with index? i was getting around 2.5million/sec against 
100,000

find-fast: func [
	series
	value
	record-length
	i "iterations"
	/local result st s
][
	
	st: now/precise
	while [i > 0][
		result: make series 0 ;length? series
		s: head series
		until [
			not if s: find  s value [
				either 0 = mod -1 + (index? s) record-length [
					insert tail result copy/part series record-length
					not tail? s: next s
				][
					s: next s
				]
			]
		]
		i: i - 1
	]
	
	print difference now/precise st
	print length? result
	
	result
]

nice name
..

we can call the winner find-fastest

this can probably be optimised further...  but note that the algorithm 
scales with density of your block

density = ratio of matches vs size of block

can it be modified for searching keys?

and especially pattern matching of some sort?

I gues find/part would work if the data were string? no?

On your doc, regarding foreach you mentioned.. 

blocks get faster as you grab more at a time, while strings slow 
down, go figure!
 
but the stats look the opposite?

if you look at the speeds,  cycling through two items at a time should 
give roughly twice the ops/second.


when you look at the results... blocks end up being faster than this, 
and strings are less than this.

btw, in my find-fast above... when search matchs aprox 1/10 times, 
it ends up being twice as slow as the foreach... 

so speed will depend on the dataset, as always.

maxim, your find-fast returns the values, not the indices (not sure 
if that was intended)

so does terry's

his "feach" yes, but not his "ind" adaptation

I'm comparing to his feach, which was faster... but if I just returned 
the index, it would be faster still (no copy/part).

I'm trying out something else, which might be even faster...

indices?-maxim-1: func [series value /local result][
    result: make block! length? series
    until [
        not if series: find series value [
            append result index? series
            series: next series
        ]
    ]
    result
]

that's your above find, stripped of the record-length stuff, and 
returning indices instead of the actual values

btw... I discovered  //  instead   of   mod,   which is twice as 
fast..... turns out  MOD is a mezz... never noticed that.

prin "Initialising ... "
random/seed now/precise
dim1: 10'000'000
dim2: dim1 / 2
needle: random dim2
haystack: make block! dim1
loop dim1 [append haystack random dim2]
print "done"

(the loop is twice as fast, meaning // is MUCH faster than using 
 mod)

here's a tiny bit of setup code, adjust dim1/dim2 as you wish. then 
find the needles in the haystack: indices? haystack needle

I'm working on a (bigger) script which has similar setup code... 
specifically meant to compare different dataset scenarios

using find/tail instead of just find speeds up things slightly:

loop kernel becomes:

not if series: find/tail series value [
            append result (index? series) - 1
        ]

ah good idea!

now, dropping the if for an all, speeds up things minimally, but 
it clean up the code

indices?-3: func [series value /local result][
    result: make block! length? series
    until [
        not all [
            series: find/tail series value
            append result (index? series) - 1
        ]
    ]
    result
]

hehe... just what I am doing  ;-)