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It is no more an oxymoron than "locally optimal". There is always a scope for claims of optimal in practice. Perhaps it was "superfluous" to say. But then, so
by KirinDave 9y ago
It is no more an oxymoron than "locally optimal". There is always a scope for claims of optimal in practice.
Perhaps it was "superfluous" to say. But then, so was your post.
- carapace 9y agoNo I don't agree. To me, it's like saying "somewhat unique". The phrase "relatively optimal" doesn't make sense to me. Do you have a server that's optimal relative to some other server? That's just "optimal", no? And if it's sub-optimal relative to some other server, that's just "sub-optimal"? Locally optimal is a known thing (it even has it's own wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum), but "relatively optimal" is just sloppy thinking in my view.
- andrewingram 9y agoIf you want to know what I meant, I can tell you. In practice I was able to have a GraphQL server which produced optimal downstream request waterfalls (i.e. to internal APIs) for every query that our app made in practice, and nearly every contrived query I could come up with. So what I mean is that if you'd hand-written the code to handle those data requirements, in nearly all scenarios you wouldn't have been able to do better. Does "optimal, nearly all the time" make you feel better?