this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
399 points (97.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

19589 readers
434 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Feyter@programming.dev
anzo@programming.dev
BurningTurtle@programming.dev
pylapp@programming.dev
399
Not everything can be done in constant time, that's O(k) (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 4 months ago by alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] victorz@lemmy.world 48 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

How in the hell does anyone f— up so bad they get O(n!²)? 🤯 That's an insanely quickly-growing graph.

Curious what the purpose of that algorithm would have been. 😅

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 37 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You have two lists of size n. You want to find the permutations of these two lists that minimizes a certain distance function between them.

[–] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Surely you could implement this via a sorting algorithm? If you can prove the distance function is a metric and both lists contains elements from the same space under that metric, isn’t the answer to sort both?

[–] jjagaimo@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 months ago

It's essentially the traveling salesman problem

[–] petersr@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Let me take a stab at it:

Problem: Given two list of length n, find what elements the two list have in common. (we assume that there are not duplicates within a single list)

Naive solution: For each element in the first list, check if it appears in the second.

Bogo solution: For each permutation of the first list and for each permutation of the second list, check if the first item in each list is the same. If so, report in the output (and make sure to only report it once).

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

lol, you'd really have to go out of your way in this scenario. First implement a way to get every single permutation of a list, then to ahead with the asinine solution. 😆 But yes, nice one! Your imagination is impressive.

[–] suzune@ani.social 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Maybe finding the (n!)²th prime?

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I guess, yeah, that'll do it. Although that'd probably be yet one or a few extra factors involving n.