Designing a useful new algorithm may take six months of research and development, but an implementation of that algorithm will take something on the order of a week of effort. There is nothing hard about implementation, a monkey could do it given adequate instruction. There is no shortcut to actually having those instructions.
Hmmm ... this seems a radical overstatement ;-) A monkey certainly can't do high-quality software engineering given any amount of training.... Though, teaching a chimp to do basic Logo programming would be a fun experiment! (Maybe someone has tried already??) Some algorithms are really simple to implement (say, quicksort), others much less so (say, MOSES). Plenty of thorny implementation issues have come up in making an efficient C++ implementation of MOSES. But still, tricky as such issues are, they are in the category of problems that one knows are definitely solvable when one sets out ... and they are certainly not as fundamentally hard as problems of inventing new algorithms... -- Ben G ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
