I had it right in the actual program where it mattered, but when I was giving my talk on it, I was asked about the time-step in a Bortz-Kalos-Lebowitz Monte Carlo simulation, and I said it was the inverse of the occurrence rate of the selected event instead of the inverse of the sum of the occurrence rates for all events.
To be more concrete—if there were 100 things that could happen, and each one would happen on average every 5 seconds, the BKL algorithm would pick one and then advance time by 5⁄100 seconds. I said it would advance time by 5 seconds.
For some reason, people took me at my word and concluded that the algorithm was prone to occasionally having nothing at all happen for extended periods of time (which is precisely what it’s made not to do), not to mention scaling improperly with system size.
I had it right in the actual program where it mattered, but when I was giving my talk on it, I was asked about the time-step in a Bortz-Kalos-Lebowitz Monte Carlo simulation, and I said it was the inverse of the occurrence rate of the selected event instead of the inverse of the sum of the occurrence rates for all events.
To be more concrete—if there were 100 things that could happen, and each one would happen on average every 5 seconds, the BKL algorithm would pick one and then advance time by 5⁄100 seconds. I said it would advance time by 5 seconds.
For some reason, people took me at my word and concluded that the algorithm was prone to occasionally having nothing at all happen for extended periods of time (which is precisely what it’s made not to do), not to mention scaling improperly with system size.