this will not be funny to many

[trochee]

Labmate just summarized a paper: "the naive algorithm is O(2ⁿ). He spends 10 pages explaining how his algorithm is O(1.9601ⁿ)."

My answer: "So if n is large, it's intractable anyway, and if n is small, it doesn't matter anyway."

"Basically, yeah."

I'm glad it's not me trying to justify that paper to the reading group.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

*laugh* Thanks.

There is some improvement there. 1.9601^10 ~= 837, a bit better than 1024. For huge problems where n>30, it's nice to have a slightly faster algorithm. But... yeah, it seems pretty insignificant.