Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 9, 2025

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF MICROCOMPUTER PARSIMONY PROGRAMS
1Department of Entomology, American Museum of Natural History, New York NY 10024.
Abstract:
Abstract- The effectiveness and efficiency of two microcomputer parsimony programs (Felsenstein's PHYLIP and Swofford's PAUP), and a prototype version of a third (SHEN, to be incorporated in Farris' HENNIG-86), are evaluated with reference to 35 data sets, including those previously used by Luckow and Pimentel (1985) to benchmark mainframe programs. Both PHYLIP and PAUP can be used effectively; with careful selection of options, their accuracy can equal or surpass that of older mainframe programs. PHYLIP is relatively inefficient (in use of computer time); its usefulness is also limited by the inability of its heuristic algorithms to detect multiple equally parsimonious solutions in a single run. PHYLIP's exact algorithm (branch-and-bound) and PAUP's heuristic and exact algorithms do not share the latter drawback but require users to spend unreasonable amounts of time coping with redundant output. The remarkable effectiveness of these programs offers hope that (particularly with the advent of multitasking microcomputers) exact and cost-effective solutions will be obtainable in many, if not all, cladistic analyses.
More Related Videos
16:23Automated, Quantitative Cognitive/Behavioral Screening of Mice: For Genetics, Pharmacology, Animal Cognition and Undergraduate Instruction
Published on: February 26, 2014
13:00Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
Related Concept Videos
Multiple Comparison Tests
It would be easy to compare two samples using a significance alpha level of 0.05. In other words, there is only one sample pair to be compared. However, it would be difficult to identify a significantly different sample if the number...
Mechanistic Models: Compartment Models in Algorithms for Numerical Problem Solving
In individual population analyses, different algorithms are employed, such as Cauchy's method, which uses a...
Heuristics
People often rely on heuristics when faced with an overload of information, limited time, low importance of the decision, limited information, or when a heuristic readily comes to mind. For...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Comparing Experimental Results: Student's t-Test
Comparing Mitochondrial, Chloroplast, and Prokaryotic Genomes