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Are there any real life examples of growth that goes like n! ? The author brings up some vague example about networks, but I was expecting some real data and a
by j7ake 5y ago
Are there any real life examples of growth that goes like n! ? The author brings up some vague example about networks, but I was expecting some real data and a simple plot.
In real life exponential growth is natural whenever something grows in proportion to its size.
Usually combinatorial explosion doesn’t really happen in real life because systems often only navigate a small subset of the total theoretically possible number of permutations.
- ahelwer 5y agoSure. Possible sequences of events in a concurrent or distributed system. Model checkers in languages like TLA+ have to contend with this. Of course in the real world only a single sequence of events actually occurs, but you have to know that your system works on that sequence whatever it is. The AWS TLA+ paper noted that at scale you’re basically guaranteed to eventually hit whatever combination of events blows up your system if such a sequence exists. Murphy’s Law of distributed systems I guess.
- jamal-kumar 5y agoI guess casinos aren't real life
- xiphias2 5y agoI'm not sure about combinatorial explosion, but Ray Kurzweil was talking about double exponential rate of innovation in the world, which may be similar. As a great example while transistor counts in processors still improve roughly with Moore's law, the cost of training a neural network to an accuracy is dropping faster than Moore's law because of algorithmic improvements.