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If I travel 25 miles in 1 hour, my speed was 25mph. If I go 100% faster, I'm going 50mph and get there in 30 minutes. If I go 200% faster, I'm going 75mph and get there in 20 minutes.

However, the original statement of "We have reduced the time for the computation by ~119%!" is still wrong-seeming, I agree. It should be "We have increased the speed for the computation by 119%" or "We have reduced the time for the computation by <WHATEVER>" :)




Language is, as you nicely point out, very tricky.

Yeah, when talking of speed, you can clearly go more than 100% faster.

But when talking of something taking a certain amount of time, like done in most benchmarks, it can't be made more than 100% faster.


You can because when you say 100% faster, it is referring to speed, and so you convert to speed than calculate time from that. Language matters :)


> We have reduced the time for the computation by ~119%!

You can say 100% faster when you are talking about speed. You can't say 100% faster when you are talking about duration. "Reduced the time" is talking about duration.




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