How Complexity Theory Can Save Your Job
summary
Builds an Amazon‑style co‑occurrence query and first tries a massive SQL join that crashes, then succeeds by generating a denormalized sales_relationships table in code (100k orders runs in ~2 hours). Shows that extending to three or more items becomes NP‑hard clique / factorial/exponential blowup, explains P vs NP vs NP‑complete, and recommends practical paths: greedy nearest neighbor and other heuristics, approximations and genetic algorithms that give good‑enough results instead of impossible exact solutions.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Start
- 25:41LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS
- 27:00COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION
- 31:03Prolog
- 33:51DECISION PROBLEMS
- 39:12MY LUCKY ALGORITHM DOESN'T EXIST
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