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Look brother you’re not winning any points by implying that you’d be the guy to invent A* on the spot. Without formal education you’re almost certainly not even

Look brother you’re not winning any points by implying that you’d be the guy to invent A* on the spot. Without formal education you’re almost certainly not even dealing with concepts like breadth-first search, trees, or nodes, so no, a ton of people will not be inventing it on the spot. Edit: most people don’t even think about recursion as a possibility until taught about it in a formal setting, and even then it’s typically a struggle to understand. Even using a queue, that’s a data structure that a person with a task to do isn’t likely to spend the time to invent on the spot.

hnfong 2y ago
I agree the vast majority of people aren't going to invent A* on the spot. But I don't understand your emphasis on "formal" education. I'm pretty sure a sufficiently smart high school kid interested in the subject could learn all these topics online in a couple months without enrolling in any college.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Without formal education you’re almost certainly not even dealing with concepts like breadth-first search, trees, or nodes, so no, a ton of people will not be inventing it on the spot. If you're not dealing with nodes, you won't be inventing A* on the spot because you don't have a problem to which it can be applied. But otherwise, it's literally a breadth-first search with the queue replaced by a priority queue. > Even using a queue, that’s a data structure that a person with a task to do isn’t likely to spend the time to invent on the spot. A to-do list is as simple as data structures get. A heap is complex, but if you want to insist on developing everything used by the algorithm from scratch, the person faced with this problem is likely to just use a sorted list. Try it out. Ask some people how they'd find the shortest path between two points through a weighted graph (use whatever terminology you want); see what they say.

hnfong 2y ago

I agree the vast majority of people aren't going to invent A* on the spot. But I don't understand your emphasis on "formal" education. I'm pretty sure a sufficiently smart high school kid interested in the subject could learn all these topics online in a couple months without enrolling in any college.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> Without formal education you’re almost certainly not even dealing with concepts like breadth-first search, trees, or nodes, so no, a ton of people will not be inventing it on the spot. If you're not dealing with nodes, you won't be inventing A* on the spot because you don't have a problem to which it can be applied. But otherwise, it's literally a breadth-first search with the queue replaced by a priority queue. > Even using a queue, that’s a data structure that a person with a task to do isn’t likely to spend the time to invent on the spot. A to-do list is as simple as data structures get. A heap is complex, but if you want to insist on developing everything used by the algorithm from scratch, the person faced with this problem is likely to just use a sorted list. Try it out. Ask some people how they'd find the shortest path between two points through a weighted graph (use whatever terminology you want); see what they say.