Receiving NaN when calculating elapsed time in Java

Question

I am writing a program that searches through the english dictionary using both an exhaustive and binary search. I have to print out the averages of each. Here is the code for both. I really don't think the issue is the find and findUsingBinarySearch itself.

public static double measureAverageExhaustiveSearchTime(String[] queries, String[] array){
    //Measures the average number of microseconds (µs) needed to find each query, using exhaustive search.
    long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
    for(int i = 0; i < queries.length; i++){
        find(queries[i], array);
    }
    long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
    double elapsedTime = (endTime - startTime);
    return (double)((elapsedTime/1000000000.0)/queries.length);
    }

   public static double measureAverageBinarySearchTime(String[] queries, String[] array){
    //Measures the average number of microseconds (µs) needed to find each query, using binary search.
    long startTime = System.nanoTime();
    for(int i = 0; i < queries.length; i++){
        findUsingBinarySearch(queries[i], array);
    }
    long endTime = System.nanoTime();
    double elapsedTime = (endTime - startTime);
    return (double)((elapsedTime/1000000000.0)/queries.length);

        //(double)(elapsedTime * 1000)/(queries.length);
}

My output is just:

EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH: NaN seconds

BINARY SEARCH: NaN seconds

FAILED EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH: NaN seconds

FAILED BINARY SEARCH: NaN seconds

---

When I used a much smaller file, I got this!

EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH: 0.0 seconds

BINARY SEARCH: 2.1E-6 seconds

FAILED EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH: 1.0E-10 seconds

FAILED BINARY SEARCH: 1.4E-6 seconds

Here is how I call the method, using the dictionary as both parameters, as I am trying to test how long it takes the array to binary search itself. I also use a copy of the dictionary with "zzz" appended to each word to facilitate a failed binary and exhaustive search.

    System.out.println("EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH: ");
System.out.println(measureAverageExhaustiveSearchTime(dictionary, dictionary)+" seconds");
System.out.println("BINARY SEARCH: ");
System.out.println(measureAverageBinarySearchTime(dictionary, dictionary)+" seconds");         
System.out.println("FAILED EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH: ");
System.out.println(measureAverageExhaustiveSearchTime(dictionaryzzz, dictionary) + " seconds");
System.out.println("FAILED BINARY SEARCH: ");
System.out.println(measureAverageBinarySearchTime(dictionaryzzz, dictionary)+" seconds");

I'm unsure of how to fix this.

Answer 1

If you're trying to convert from milliseconds to microseconds, you should be multiplying, instead of dividing, by 1000.

Your measureAverageExhaustiveSearchTime code:

return (double)((elapsedTime/1000000000.0)/queries.length);

This should be:

return (double)((elapsedTime*1000.0)/queries.length);

Furthermore I would avoid converting the startTime and endTime long datatypes by casting this to a double when solving for elapsedTime . Try to stay in one datatype. Datatype conversions sometimes results in chopped off results, or unexpected flooring of values.

Answer 2

It seems your query array does not contain any elements. So it is empty and its length is zero (0). As an effect you get a division by zero which results in Double.NaN ,

Answer 3

A NaN value is used to represent the result of certain invalid operations such as dividing zero by zero . NaN constants of both float and double type are predefined as Float.NaN and Double.NaN . So, the problem is obviously with (elapsedTime/1000000000.0)/queries.length) and other such statement.

Answer 4

Read this article. The whole article will be extremely useful for you, but this part is especially important:

"NaN" stands for "not a number". "Nan" is produced if a floating point operation has some input parameters that cause the operation to produce some undefined result. For example, 0.0 divided by 0.0 is arithmetically undefined. Taking the square root of a negative number is also undefined.

Now, please debug your code and watch your values, especially at your return statement. If you can see something unusual in your arithmetic operations, like 0 divided by 0, then that's the root of the problem.