Abstract

INTRODUCTION Baskett's "Puzzle" benchmark has been used for almost a decade for the evaluation of hardware architectures, and was included in the "Gabriel" suite of Lisp benchmarks [Gabriel85]. "Puzzle" solves a 3-dimensional packing problem by attempting to pack pieces of 4 different types into a 5x5x5 cube. The class of such packing problems is closely related to the "bin-packing" and "knapsack" problems of complexity theory, which are known to be NP-complete [Baase78]. Thus, while it is unlikely that clever programming will allow us to escape the asymptotic exponential behavior of these problems, it can gain us some very real performance improvements. It is worth studying packing problems because of their ubiquity in the real world. In addition to the obvious examples from business---e.g., freight loading---there are similarities with real problems in biochemical bonding. The standard version of Puzzle found in the Gabriel benchmark suite is an embarrassment for the Lisp

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