Twice in the last month, I have read comments about certain problems being intrinsically hard to solve.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
In a fascinating book I just started to read called Algorithms to Live By<\/em>, authors Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths say:<\/p>\r\n\r\n Life is full of problems that are, quite simply, hard<\/em>. And the mistakes made by people often say more about the intrinsic difficulties of the problem than about the fallibility of human brains. (p. 5)<\/em><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n And on the blog Walking Randomly<\/a>, Mike Croucher observed:<\/p>\r\n\r\n I see [a particular] thought pattern in a lot of areas. The pattern looks like this:<\/p>\r\n\r\n It’s hard to do ‘thing’. Most smart people do ‘thing’ with ‘foo’ and, since ‘thing’ is hard, many people have experienced problems with ‘foo’. Hence, people bash ‘foo’ a lot. ‘foo’ sucks!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n We run into the question of problem complexity a lot in MATLAB design. For example, many people get confused trying to write a recursive function. Is that because the language design is flawed in some way? I tend to think the root cause can instead be found in the inherent conceptual complexity associated with recursion.<\/p>\r\n\r\n That said, we always have to guard against complacency. Any time we see our users have difficulty completing their tasks, we look for ways to improve our product design.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twice in the last month, I have read comments about certain problems being intrinsically hard to solve.\r\n\r\nIn a fascinating book I just started to read called Algorithms to Live By, authors Brian... read more >><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1779,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions\/1779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n
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