a tree question
John Hascall
hascall at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu
Wed Aug 30 01:04:23 AEST 1989
In article <77200043 at p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies at p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
}Re: Hascall from Cornell criticizes the high overhead in Splay Trees
} blames problem on theoretical computer scientists.
Just because we are in the middle of Iowa is no reason to call
our university "CORNell"!
Anyway, I merely pointed out that asymptotic efficiency (big O)
does not always equate to real world efficiency. The converse
can also be true (i.e., qsort).
I wasn't blaming anyone, just stating that in theory many practical
aspects are overlooked/ignored in order to make the theory more
manageable/tractable/understandable.
This does not make the theory any less important, rather it merely
emphasizes that what's important is knowing how to decide which
theory is applicable to your real world problem (and knowing how
to apply it).
John Hascall
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
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