2026/06/30 by Ruize Zhao
#cs.DS
The textbook choice B=sqrt(n) for square-root decomposition is asymptotically natural, but it is not always the fastest implementation choice. We study block-size autotuning as a reproducible algorithm-engineering problem. On 3,840 generated workloads with repeated grouped cross-validation, the selected KNN-9 policy reduces mean regret from 1.2769 to 1.0478 and yields a paired geometric-mean speedup of 1.158x over fixed sqrt(n) blocking. A separate Docker/Linux confirmation over 960 workloads gives the same direction of effect (1.112x). We retain two trace-derived checks: the six-window Baleen study improves by 1.104x, whereas the three-workload Wikidata smoke study is slower than fixed blocking. These contrasting results delimit the contribution: workload-aware selection can improve an already chosen block-decomposition implementation, but it is neither a universal replacement for fixed blocking nor a replacement for BIT.