research-article

Experience report: growing and shrinking polygons for random testing of computational geometry algorithms

Author:

Ilya SergeyAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP 2016: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

Pages 193 - 199

https://doi.org/10.1145/2951913.2951927

Published: 04 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper documents our experience of adapting and using the QuickCheck-style approach for extensive randomised property-based testing of computational geometry algorithms.

The need in rigorous evaluation of computational geometry procedures has naturally arisen in our quest of organising a medium-size programming contest for second year university students—an experiment we conducted as an attempt to introduce them to computational geometry. The main effort in organising the event was implementation of a solid infrastructure for testing and ranking solutions. For this, we employed functional programming techniques. The choice of the language and the paradigm made it possible for us to engineer, from scratch and in a very short period of time, a series of robust geometric primitives and algorithms, as well as implement a scalable framework for their randomised testing.

We describe the main insights, enabling efficient random testing of geometric procedures, and report on our experience of using the testing framework, which helped us to detect and fix a number of issues not just in our programming artefacts, but also in the published algorithms we had implemented.

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Cited By

Almeida JCunha AMacedo NPacheco HProença J(2018)Teaching how to program using automated assessment and functional glossy games (experience report)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32367772:ICFP(1-17)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236777
Midtgaard J(2018)QuickChecking Patricia TreesTrends in Functional Programming10.1007/978-3-319-89719-6_4(59-78)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89719-6_4

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Experience report: growing and shrinking polygons for random testing of computational geometry algorithms

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICFP 2016: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 2016

501 pages

ISBN:9781450342193

DOI:10.1145/2951913

General Chairs:
Jacques Garrigue
Nagoya University, Japan
,
Gabriele Keller
University of New South Wales, Australia
,
Program Chair:
Eijiro Sumii
Tohoku University, Japan

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 51, Issue 9
ICFP '16
September 2016
501 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/3022670
Editor:
Matthew Fluet
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 September 2016

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ICFP'16: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 18 - 24, 2016

Nara, Japan

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Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

Almeida JCunha AMacedo NPacheco HProença J(2018)Teaching how to program using automated assessment and functional glossy games (experience report)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32367772:ICFP(1-17)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236777
Midtgaard J(2018)QuickChecking Patricia TreesTrends in Functional Programming10.1007/978-3-319-89719-6_4(59-78)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89719-6_4

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