Cognitive Asymptotics

Short blog content for daily posting streak. Standard disclaimers apply. Not much to see here.

At some point in the past, because I was a bored teenager, I memorized this.

So now, in theory, I can tell you the capital of each state of the U.S. This is already a lame trick, but as I realized yesterday, it’s made even lamer by the fact that the data structure I chose only supports O(n) lookup.

This is really slow! Moral of the story: Asymptotics matter.

P.S. Okay, to be pedantic, since the number of states in the song is pretty much fixed at 50, any lookup method is O(1), and I made that argument once before myself. But you know the intuitive sense I’m trying to get at.

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