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I would argue that for most entrepreneurs studying machine learning has greater marginal utility than studying complexity theory, but to each his/her own I gues

I would argue that for most entrepreneurs studying machine learning has greater marginal utility than studying complexity theory, but to each his/her own I guess.

YuriNiyazov 18y ago
Depends what your niche is. Do you manage a petabyte cluster? All of a sudden, everything that used to be "complexity theory" becomes "complexity practice".
- barbie17 18y ago
  No, I don't think we are talking about the same kind of complexity here. Complexity Theory is exactly the opposite of real world pragmatism. It is about the asymptotic behaviors of algorithms and the resources need to solve certain class of problems such as Traveling Salesman or Min-Set-Cover.
  - YuriNiyazov 18y ago
    Actually, that is exactly what I am talking about. The implication was that problems like that do show up in "real-life" coding, and while brute-force solutions for those problems work for very small n, you need to recognize the fact that those problems do not have reasonable solutions in general, and you should know how to approximate the solutions (in the technical sense of "approximation"), and furthermore know enough complexity theory to know the situations where even an approximation will not have a reasonable solution. For example, I believe that the problem of creating optimal schedules for high school students is NP-Complete (optimal in the sense that it will satisfy all of the students' preferences for electives, and all of the teachers' preferences for the classes they want to teach). Yes, I admit that the example will never involve petabytes of data. That doesn't invalidate my original point though.
Rod 18y ago
I certainly do agree that for most entrepreneurs machine learning is much more useful than computational complexity theory. However, I figured there might be some people on HN who would like to learn a bit more about complexity, and hence I submitted the URL, not because it's extremely useful, but because it's very interesting.
Herring 18y ago
Life's too important to spend fixated on marginal utility.
- nikete 18y ago
  So thats your objective function.

I would argue that for most entrepreneurs studying machine learning has greater marginal utility than studying complexity theory, but to each his/her own I guess.

YuriNiyazov 18y ago

Depends what your niche is. Do you manage a petabyte cluster? All of a sudden, everything that used to be "complexity theory" becomes "complexity practice".

barbie17 18y ago
No, I don't think we are talking about the same kind of complexity here. Complexity Theory is exactly the opposite of real world pragmatism. It is about the asymptotic behaviors of algorithms and the resources need to solve certain class of problems such as Traveling Salesman or Min-Set-Cover.
- YuriNiyazov 18y ago
  Actually, that is exactly what I am talking about. The implication was that problems like that do show up in "real-life" coding, and while brute-force solutions for those problems work for very small n, you need to recognize the fact that those problems do not have reasonable solutions in general, and you should know how to approximate the solutions (in the technical sense of "approximation"), and furthermore know enough complexity theory to know the situations where even an approximation will not have a reasonable solution. For example, I believe that the problem of creating optimal schedules for high school students is NP-Complete (optimal in the sense that it will satisfy all of the students' preferences for electives, and all of the teachers' preferences for the classes they want to teach). Yes, I admit that the example will never involve petabytes of data. That doesn't invalidate my original point though.

Rod 18y ago

I certainly do agree that for most entrepreneurs machine learning is much more useful than computational complexity theory. However, I figured there might be some people on HN who would like to learn a bit more about complexity, and hence I submitted the URL, not because it's extremely useful, but because it's very interesting.

Herring 18y ago

Life's too important to spend fixated on marginal utility.

nikete 18y ago
So thats your objective function.