Questions

1. Arrange the following three items in order of importance when building a software application: correctness (the program does what it is supposed to do), efficiency (the program is optimized in speed and memory management), and functionality (the program runs).
2. How could assert statements be used in Python to check for the correctness of a program?
3. What is a benchmark in the context of optimizing a software program?
4. How could timeit magic commands be used in Python to estimate the speed of a piece of code?
5. List three different types of information that are recorded and returned by cProfile (included as output columns) in the context of profiling a program.
6. On a high level, what is the role of the dis module in optimization?
7. In the exercise.py file, we write a simple function, close(), that checks whether a pair of particles are close to each other (with 1e-5 tolerance). In benchmark(), we randomly initialize two particles and call close() after running the simulation. Make a guess of what takes most of the execution time in close(), and profile the function via benchmark() using cProfile; does the result confirm your guess?