MC: Ping-Pong Cubes

[brickviking]

Merely thinking helps get the job done

(05-27-2018 09:19 PM)pier4r Wrote:  ...
Then I realized that also the brain is quite some computing device - although more for problem solving. In general the solution of a problem should be computed from the start and not only when the computing device runs. So if I use more refined techniques that takes more time to bring me the solution, would be faster - as described by David Hayden - to use a less refined technique that let me reach the solution faster.

That is: "running time" is only a part of the "solution time". So if I solve something with a state of the art algorithm in assembly and I take 3 months, of which 4 minutes for the computation, while someone else does it in gw-basic with a almost brute force algorithm and takes 3 days, of which 2.5 days for the computation, the latter is better.

Want to know what the laugh is? I was trying to find a way to say exactly this in my last post, but I think you've covered it better than I could. Nicely put.

In reply to this, I'll post something that Fred Brooks wrote about. Requoted from the wikiquote page for Fred Brooks):

Quote:…well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

As quoted [paraphrased] from Toolbox, Java World, July 1999

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