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This might help some understand why speed doesn't matter to an algorithm | 443 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
This might help some understand why speed doesn't matter to an algorithm
Authored by: tknarr on Monday, December 31 2012 @ 08:50 PM EST

Yes. I sometimes put it in a more metaphysical way: "How do you know how long a second is?". If the system the Universe is running on suspended our process to give run-time to another, how would we know? More importantly, would it matter? Time inside the Universe would still pass at the rate of one second per second, even if that one second took 5 hours outside the Universe.

This used to be really applicable to digital electronics. In labs we'd routinely replace the clock in a circuit with a switch so we could manually step the circuit through it's paces. Even slow clocks were far too fast when we needed to probe input and output states at multiple spots in the circuit, and it was really handy to be able to click one clock cycle, measure here and there, check the results and measure somewhere else or not depending on whether or not the first measurements matched what we expected, click another clock cycle, lather rinse repeat one tick at a time until we found where the states were going off the rails. The circuit didn't care whether the clock was a manually-controlled switch or a regular clock running at several megahertz, to it time passed at a rate of one tick per tick either way and it simply didn't care how long one tick took on someone else's wall clock.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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