help!: optimization of search problem (example code)

[Marcus Stojek]

>SciPy has a vector quantization module that does what your looking for and
>it is pretty fast.
>
>C:\temp>python vq_ex.py
>500 points ran in 0.037537 seconds
>
You are comparing two lists with 500 points each. In my example
I perform the search for 500 points out of la but I have to search
for the counterpart in lb which has 20000 points.

Nevertheless i tried scipy. Here are some times:
(same size for both lists)

500 points : 0.33557 sec 
1000 points: 1.321 sec
2000 points: 6.055 sec
20000 points: 967.2 sec

My example-code  needs 197.8 sec ;-)

Anyway, scipy seems to be extremly useful.
Thanks
Marcus