ITA T Problem
Dec. 17th, 2005 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmazeThere was a coding problem. It involved the T. My willpower was weak. But I have now concluded that, if you leave Alewife at 5:15 AM, you can visit the entire rapid transit system (going to Mattapan, but ignoring the Silver Lie -- it's a bus) and get back to Kendall by 3:30 PM. Now, if I actually had any interest in working for ITA, this wouldn't have been wasted effort, but I'm happy in my current job, thank you very much, and no matter how much you pretend you're just not Google Labs.
I think I have demonstrated my fundamental coding bug, though, which is a scaling issue. See, I like using vectors and lists for things. They're easy to understand. Haskell has very straightforward syntax for them. But sometimes taking O(n) to insert something into a sorted list is just the wrong answer. Funny how much faster things run when you choose a better data structure. Alas, the problem has now devolved into a graph-search problem, and it's just not interesting any more.
I think I have demonstrated my fundamental coding bug, though, which is a scaling issue. See, I like using vectors and lists for things. They're easy to understand. Haskell has very straightforward syntax for them. But sometimes taking O(n) to insert something into a sorted list is just the wrong answer. Funny how much faster things run when you choose a better data structure. Alas, the problem has now devolved into a graph-search problem, and it's just not interesting any more.
