Are SunSpider times normally (gaussian) distributed?
There are a bunch of normality tests out there but I didn’t want to do anything complicated. Instead, I just made a histogram of times and compared it to the best fit normal distribution. For my 1000 runs, the mean was 1232.2 and the standard deviation was 11.48. Here is a plot of the observed times in black and the normal distribution with mean 1232.2 and standard deviation 11.48 in red (ignore the blue line for now): The shape is vaguely bell-curve like, but the scaling really isn’t normal. In particular, the peak of the empirical data is about twice as high as the normal distribution model, and the data is much more concentrated a center band. Also, the tail of the real data goes much further to the right than the normal distribution. In particular, for the longest time I got, 1329ms, the normal distribution has a probability of 1.3×10^-14. Finally, the left tail of the data falls off a bit faster than the normal distribution. It’s safe to say these times are not normally distribute
