Average == mean
Median == point where half the values < and half the values are >
An average will /not/ give you what you want. The median will do it. Try
it - take a bunch of runs and plot mean, median, max, min and you'll see.
: But earlier you seemed to imply that the minimum is not
: generally a meaningful number, because they were way out on the tails of
: normal distributions.
Err, I never said that results follow a normal distribution. In fact,
I would probably be the person that says they don't - normal, gaussian,
whatever, real world results tend not follow them anywhere near as much
as the modeling folks would like you to believe.
And I didn't say that the min is meaningless, I said that it isn't always
representative. Feel free to take any benchmark and plot a bunch of runs
and look at them. After you do that for a while, the median starts to look
like a really good choice. At least it did for me.
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