Comment by tonfa
1 day ago
Tiny Pointers doesn't currently have practical use, it's a complexity results.
> The team’s results may not lead to any immediate applications, but that’s not all that matters, Conway said. “It’s important to understand these kinds of data structures better. You don’t know when a result like this will unlock something that lets you do better in practice.”
Yeah, naive application of big-O complexity models can lead you far astray when you have real world problems. If you can do F in n*k1 time, but I need n*n*k2 time you may think your algorithm for F is better, O(n) compared to O(n squared) but if k1 is 1 second while k2 is 80 nanoseconds then actually my "worse" algorithm is faster until n is so huge that we have runtimes of about half a year.