A (hopefully interesting) aside about avoiding branches is if you don't need an exact answer but need your code to make a decision based on an approximation over some known range, you can employ a basic fuzzy logic method. Serially add, subtract, or multiply to adjust a value by a handful of weighted inputs then use that value instead of branching repeatedly to choose the right action. You might branch once based on the final value where it would have otherwise been a larger tree of decisions. In fortuitous situations, you may avoid branching altogether.