Daniel Lemire's blog

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Fast argmax in Python

In my post Computing argmax fast in Python, I reported that Python has no builtin function to compute argmax, the position of a maximal value. I provided one such function and asked people to improve my solution. Here are the results:

argmax function running time
array.index(max(array)) 0.1 s
max(izip(array, xrange(len(array))))[1] 0.2 s

Conclusion: array.index(max(array)) is simpler and faster.

Update: Please see The language interpreters are the new machines.