Python for Absolute Beginners Transcripts
Chapter: The big ideas of software development
Lecture: Formal algorithms
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We could have easily come up
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with this algorithm on our own
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but it turns out that many of these techniques
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appear over and over
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and they get applied to all sorts of different problems
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and these I will call formal algorithms.
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For example, the thing that we just did
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is a Binary Search algorithm
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where you start with somewhere
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and then you start breaking it into halves
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and say, Can we exclude half of the data?
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Yes, or can we, make sure we only focus on half of the data
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and start partitioning down.
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And you can go learn all sorts of things about this
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given some amount of data in an unoptimistic case
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we'd have to make as many guesses as possible
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or until there is no other sort of path
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that doesn't allow for another guess.
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It would be this complexity called O(log n)
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which means as you add more data
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10 versus a hundred versus a thousand
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the time it takes to find the answer
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is the log of 10 or a hundred or a thousand
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as a ratio not exactly as a number.
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And the best part is
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maybe you just guess the number straight up
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and that's just, doesn't matter how much data there is
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if you guessed right.
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The point is not to look at this complexity and stuff
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but once you identify one of these formal algorithms
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all of a sudden you can see all the stuff
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that people have studied about it
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you can see, oh, it actually applies in this other case.
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I first thought it was just about guessing
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the number of M&M's in that jar
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but it turns out it also helps me
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optimize this pathfinding algorithm
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or pathfinding program that I am trying to write.
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I don't even know if that's actually true
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but once you know the algorithm
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you then know that it can be applied
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to all these different things.
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So we're not going to go deep into a bunch of algorithms
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because this is not a Computer Science course
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but that's the idea.
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You're going to run into these things
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you're like, Oh, I thought I just made this up.
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But no, it's actually this sort of formal thing
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that was studied
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or somebody might tell you
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Oh, it's this kind of algorithm.
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And then you can go and look it up
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see how to do it in Python
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usually there is a resource for that.
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To these algorithms
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sometimes it's just thinking
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about how my users are logging into my site
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other times they're much more formalized
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like this search algorithm here.
