On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 10:17 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Elijah Newren <newren@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > Am I mixing up negatives/positives (as I'm prone to do), or would it > > be more correct to say the new algorithm risks suboptimal positives > > rather than that it risks false negatives? > > I'm prone to mixing them up, too, but I think they are the sides of > the same coin. Imagine there is a path X on the source side, and > two paths Y and Z on the destination side. With exhaustive match, > Z might be a better match (content-wise) to X than Y is to X. > > For the path X on the source that is matched with a suboptimal > counterpart Y on the destination side, we may call the situation a > false-positive because with a more exhaustive search we might have > been able to find Z that is a better match. For the path Z on the > destination side that was culled too early with heuristics and > failed to be matched with the source path X that got matched with a > suboptimal destination path Y, it is a loss for Z---it wasn't chosen > when it should have been (i.e. a false negative, as Z saw no > counterparts). > > In any case, during the word search for "inexact", "more precise", > "more expensive", I do not think negatives and positives will play a > big role anyway, so... Indeed, I've gotten us off on a bit of a tangent, but thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. :-)
