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Could you give an example of one of the times something theoretical helped you solve a real world problem? I've thought about going back for my CS degree a lot

by 147 7y ago

Could you give an example of one of the times something theoretical helped you solve a real world problem? I've thought about going back for my CS degree a lot but can't really justify the cost and time investment vs self teaching. But it's something that's always been in the back of my mind.

phaedrus 7y ago
Not the OP, but I too was a self-taught programmer as a teen who got a CS degree in my 20s. I independently came up with the idea binary search in sorted data structures. But the first time I encountered hash tables in the course of getting my CS degree my reaction was "That's impossible! You can't get O(1) efficiency!" (Sadly though this exposure was not in the context of a theoretical course on data structures, but rather in the context of reading the docs for HashMap as my university dropped older courses and languages to jump on the bandwagon of becoming a "Java school".)
learc83 7y ago
Sure. It's been a while, but the first one is that comes to mind is when we went over Floyd's Tortoise and Hare cycle detection algorithm. I realized it was a much cleaner solution to detecting cycles in a linked list than a solution I developed on my own over several days. Another example: the automata class I took went over pushdown automata, and I immediately saw that it would solve the issues I'd been having with a finite state machine I was using to handle input for a game. Oh and recently I needed to put different sections of a screen on different layers so that no 2 adjacent sections were on the same layer. I realized that this was basically just graph coloring, so I was able to find a solution in minutes instead of hours. I'm sure their are people who can get through most of a CS curriculum on their own, but I'm not that disciplined. I've also never met anyone who was. It has been immensely helpful.

by 147 7y ago

phaedrus 7y ago

Not the OP, but I too was a self-taught programmer as a teen who got a CS degree in my 20s. I independently came up with the idea binary search in sorted data structures. But the first time I encountered hash tables in the course of getting my CS degree my reaction was "That's impossible! You can't get O(1) efficiency!" (Sadly though this exposure was not in the context of a theoretical course on data structures, but rather in the context of reading the docs for HashMap as my university dropped older courses and languages to jump on the bandwagon of becoming a "Java school".)

learc83 7y ago

Sure. It's been a while, but the first one is that comes to mind is when we went over Floyd's Tortoise and Hare cycle detection algorithm. I realized it was a much cleaner solution to detecting cycles in a linked list than a solution I developed on my own over several days. Another example: the automata class I took went over pushdown automata, and I immediately saw that it would solve the issues I'd been having with a finite state machine I was using to handle input for a game. Oh and recently I needed to put different sections of a screen on different layers so that no 2 adjacent sections were on the same layer. I realized that this was basically just graph coloring, so I was able to find a solution in minutes instead of hours. I'm sure their are people who can get through most of a CS curriculum on their own, but I'm not that disciplined. I've also never met anyone who was. It has been immensely helpful.