[OpenJDK 2D-Dev] X11 uniform scaled wide lines and dashed lines; STROKE_CONTROL in Pisces

Jim Graham james.graham at oracle.com
Wed Dec 15 01:32:00 UTC 2010


Hi Denis,

On 12/14/2010 5:11 PM, Denis Lila wrote:
> I have one question though: how fast does this have to be? I can come
> up with fairly reasonable examples for which both CubicCurve2D.solveCubic
> and the implementation I found give very inaccurate results

The existing method was not very accurate as you discovered so we don't 
necessarily need to go too far in terms of accuracy if it means changing 
its performance radically.

> (i.e. evaluating the cubic on the computed "roots" gives numbers as
> high as 1e-4). I read on the bug reports that what we should do is
> treat the closed form as a crude approximation and then use the Newton
> method to really find the roots. I like this idea (with perhaps the
> exception of the Newton method - I think we might be better off
> using something like false position, or even simply a binary search).
> The binary search gives results that when evaluated are as small as
> 1e-17 which is as close to correct as possible in double precision
> (because my termination condition was while(middle != start&&  middle != end)).
> That didn't even take an outrageous number of iterations - 77 was the
> highest I observed.

How big are these errors expressed as multiples of the ULP of the 
coefficients?  Obviously 1e-17 is a lot smaller than 1e-4, but was 1e-17 
representing "just a couple of bits of error" or was it still way off 
with respect to the numbers being used?  And were these fairly obscure 
equations that were off?

Not knowing these answers, it is hard to prioritize the added accuracy 
against the performance hit.

If the hit is very small for the vast majority of equations, and/or if 
we had a test for "already close enough" that eliminated the need for 
refining most roots then it might be worth it - otherwise we could 
consider adding a second version that called the first and then refined 
the results so the developer could choose the accuracy they needed.

Feel like running some timings?

>> 4724552
>> 4493128
>> 4074742
>> 4724556
>> (etc.  Those were just the bugs I found on the first 2 pages of a bug
>> database search)
>> Double (triple, etc.) credit - woohoo!  ;-)
>
> Isn't there some sort of diminishing returns after the first duplicate ;-)

Not really, but if the number of dups is higher than some unknown value 
then people start looking at you with raised eyebrows...

http://i18.tinypic.com/34461wi.jpg

			...jim



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