Do We Worship Complexity?

Re:Do We Worship Complexity? by taeric on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @04:06PM (#18232767)

Tough to say, really. If your O(1) is just a constant 2000 code artifacts, but your O(n) is 5 per business requirement, it is amusing to consider that 400 business requirements might be better spread over more systems.

My view is that, even in algorithm analysis, Big-O has been overused. Too many people will point out crap like "That is 4 items per entity!" When I point out we only have 50 entities and that 200 is an easily handled number, I just get evil glares.

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Re:Do We Worship Complexity? by MaxBarraclough on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:09PM (#18233735)

Somewhat related: I've always enjoyed that the matrix multiplication algorithms with the best theoretical time complexity, are completely impractical for use on real-world matrix multiplication problems.

Wikipedia describes why people use the Strassen algorithm in real-world implementations, despite its inferior asymptotic time complexity [0] :

> unlike the Strassen algorithm, it is not used in practice because it only provides an advantage for matrices so large that they cannot be processed by modern hardware.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppersmith%E2%80%93Winograd_a...

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Re:Do We Worship Complexity? by taeric on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:33PM (#18233884)

Had a fun discussion on that in this forum not long ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891360

Basically, I was hoping some of the optimized methods were competitive nowdays. Spoiler, still not practical. :(

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