Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a be...
by pron on Monday February 16, 2015 @06:45PM
(#9059785)
> Are you talking about being able to write A* and other algorithms from scratch with no reference material?
No, I mean knowing what algorithms/data-structures are available, what their characteristics are, and how to tweak them. This way you can say stuff like: with those data access patterns, we'll need a B+-tree with links for concurrency, modified to not delete depleted nodes until such-and-such. Or, something like: doing that efficiently requires an optimization that's NP-hard because the problem reduces to graph partitioning, but we can use an approximate solution that should work well-enough in this case.
No, I mean knowing what algorithms/data-structures are available, what their characteristics are, and how to tweak them. This way you can say stuff like: with those data access patterns, we'll need a B+-tree with links for concurrency, modified to not delete depleted nodes until such-and-such. Or, something like: doing that efficiently requires an optimization that's NP-hard because the problem reduces to graph partitioning, but we can use an approximate solution that should work well-enough in this case.