> When people realized this problem can't be solved by throwing money at it, the next suggestion was to artificially constrain n to be small enough that the pro

> When people realized this problem can't be solved by throwing money at it, the next suggestion was to artificially constrain n to be small enough that the program completes... It was at this point that I optimized the algorithm so it ran in O(n log n) or something similar. Something that we should have done from the start. I had the exact same situation at my previous job. Heck, the CEO even sold it as an advantage of our system, highlighting how few data we needed to get good results. Except our results were crap. I fixed that problem and many others, and left the job three years ago, but they are still selling their product the same way. Some times you really need a big amount of data to get good results.