4 ms·

What if you add the constraint that the user has a library of a N songs and you wanted to fill the CD completely for a road trip? An approximate solution would

by mwerty 18y ago

What if you add the constraint that the user has a library of a N songs and you wanted to fill the CD completely for a road trip? An approximate solution would work for the above but you can see how easily it pops up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem Complexity theory is the coolest thing I've learned. I think thats why people study it - they don't particularly care about the practicality of their work. Which is ok. Breakthroughs and connections are often unexpected (It's hard to discuss cryptography without understanding it), so you might as well let the smart people do whatever they feel like in academia than declare x,y,z to be the 'real' issues people are facing that should be solved - we have the market/industry for that. Incidentally, I wasted a lot of time thinking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_problem in high school - I was trying to figure out how to make the A-side and B-side of a mix tape of equal length.

markessien 18y ago
That has little to do with burning a CD. The particular problem you bring as an example is a small and completely optional problem that one would be faced compared to the entire task. And I could look up a solution in 15 minutes.
- alphamule 18y ago
  And thus, you've just gone and demolished your entire argument. There is no solution in reasonable time, which is why mwerty brought it up. This whole downvote storm is because your OP was "CS students love dropping four letters: P, NP, O and N. Whenever I want to judge who was a bit too focused on the surface details of computer science, and too little on the real problems, I wait to see if those 4 letters come up in a sentence." and there is a crowd of people here whose work on real problems involves those four letters all the time & couldn't be done without extensive knowledge about them and discussing them endlessly. Maybe they don't come up so often when writing cd burning programs or robotics (though I find the latter hard to believe since any planning algorithms should hit up against this quickly), but other people have their own real problems where it does. I'm trying hard not to be dismissive here, even though your original post reeked of dismissiveness.
- mwerty 18y ago
  If only you get to decide what's small, what's completely optional and whats the entire task, you are right and I submit. You would have to be crazy smart to figure out P,NP, etc. in 15 minutes without pre-existing knowledge of it.

by mwerty 18y ago

markessien 18y ago

That has little to do with burning a CD. The particular problem you bring as an example is a small and completely optional problem that one would be faced compared to the entire task. And I could look up a solution in 15 minutes.

alphamule 18y ago
And thus, you've just gone and demolished your entire argument. There is no solution in reasonable time, which is why mwerty brought it up. This whole downvote storm is because your OP was "CS students love dropping four letters: P, NP, O and N. Whenever I want to judge who was a bit too focused on the surface details of computer science, and too little on the real problems, I wait to see if those 4 letters come up in a sentence." and there is a crowd of people here whose work on real problems involves those four letters all the time & couldn't be done without extensive knowledge about them and discussing them endlessly. Maybe they don't come up so often when writing cd burning programs or robotics (though I find the latter hard to believe since any planning algorithms should hit up against this quickly), but other people have their own real problems where it does. I'm trying hard not to be dismissive here, even though your original post reeked of dismissiveness.
mwerty 18y ago
If only you get to decide what's small, what's completely optional and whats the entire task, you are right and I submit. You would have to be crazy smart to figure out P,NP, etc. in 15 minutes without pre-existing knowledge of it.