I think that the author phrased himself clumsily or (less likely) misunderstands O-notation. My guess is that he intended to say, "As the problem gets bigger, throwing more computing power at it gets less and less efficient," and got tripped up in the words.
Ah, this makes much more sense, thanks.
Re:The Deceptive Anagram Question
by gamesbrainiac on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @08:20PM
(#9385155)
I am terribly for the failure of an illustration I provided. I'm sorry I didn't see this sooner, or I would've jumped at a second chance to explain. I assure you, I'll try to do better in the future.
But more seriously, I think I worded my question poorly. I understand why O(n^2) is not ideal. The author's statement was: "for more computing power we throw at this the slower it gets per computer." Now I'm not sure how he would seek to throw computing power at the algorithm, but I can immediatly think of a parallel implementation of this algorithm with efficiency O(1), at least for p<=n.
So my question is, why does a quadratic algorithm neccesarily imply diminishing returns when you add more computing power? That is how I interpreted his sentence and it is not clear to me.