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A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible. (www.quantamagazine.org)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

the reason it confused me is because the college student was clearly using the algorithm to accomplish his task, not just theoretically designed. So it didn't seem to be a small improvement that would only be noticeable in certain situations.

I'm not smart enough to understand the papers so that's why I asked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

Oh no it's definitely a theoretical paper. Even if the theory is fully formalised and thus executable it still wouldn't give much insight on how it'd perform in the real world because theorem provers aren't the most performant programming languages.

And, FWIW, CS theorists don't really care about running programs same as theoretical physicists don't care much about banging rocks together, in both cases making things work in the real world is up to engineers.