3 ms·
From the sound of it, the original request was probably stated as something massive and NP hard, he asked for the 'best' placement and was told it would take mo
by tel 16y ago
From the sound of it, the original request was probably stated as something massive and NP hard, he asked for the 'best' placement and was told it would take more time than seconds since the big bang to locate the best placement.
Then somebody actually talked to him and took the time to realize he didn't need the optimal solution.
- eru 16y agoActually, solving most practical instances of NP hard problems is doable and quite tractable.
- tel 16y agoObviously it depends a whole lot on the scale. They gave some idea of number of constraints required to be satisfied, but it's not clear to me what the actual constraints were. I think it's not outrageous that on scan it might have sounded intractable.
- kenjackson 16y agoActually, solving most practical instances of NP hard problems is doable and quite tractable. Isn't that a tautology? Because if it wasn't doable then it wouldn't be practical.
- eru 16y agoPractical here means: Occurs in practice. And that they are optimally solvable in practice is not a tautology. It could be that you would need human insight (like you still need for most proving interesting mathematical theorems), or that people would only solve approximations. (People do solve approximations, too.)