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A comment on Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm? by zaphar on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @09:00AM (#18238498)
I think you might be in the minority in this opinion. Many algorithms have pathological cases but are still considered algorithms
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Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm? by another-cuppa on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @10:56AM (#18239667)
Minority? This is directly from Knuth.
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Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm? by bstamour on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @04:36PM (#18243550)
Knuth defines effectiveness as: "... all of the operations to be performed in the algorithm must be sufficiently basic that they can in principle be done exactly and in a finite length of time by a man using paper and pencil."

K-means and other heuristic algorithms fit that description.

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