3 ms·
Not 100% correct, and certainly not catchy, but it's definitely help guide my understanding of the practice. I had the opposite experience with this descriptio
by argv_empty 16y ago
Not 100% correct, and certainly not catchy, but it's definitely help guide my understanding of the practice.
I had the opposite experience with this description. I could see that there was a table being filled in, but it didn't give me any understanding of what the table gets filled with and why. My capability with it remained cargo-cultish until I had seen memoization isolated and discussed explicitly.
- ezyang 16y agoInteresting! I always thought the table metaphor really appealed to a "pencil and paper" mentality, which would be all about computing "more and more pieces of the table" until it was full.
- argv_empty 16y agoIt does. The problem is that it doesn't really explain why what you're filling in on the table is correct. Learning algorithms by rote was possible, but devising them for problems I hadn't seen before was not. Now, I don't need to memorize -- reconstruction is easier.