Closest pair optimization on modern hardware

Jason Bright
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:42:40 PDT

In this project we examine the performance of several algorithms for finding the closest pair of points out of a given set of points in a plane. We look at four algorithms, including brute force, recursive, non-recursive, and a random expected linear time for numbers of points ranging from one hundred to one billion. In our examination, we find that on average the non-recursive is the fastest, except for limited cases of 100 points for the brute force, and 32 bit spaces for the random expected linear.