Comment by osti
5 hours ago
Hmm your last sentence seems to exactly agree that it's a class of algos that parallelize well? What does sped up arbitrarily mean? It's still polynomial speed up right?
5 hours ago
Hmm your last sentence seems to exactly agree that it's a class of algos that parallelize well? What does sped up arbitrarily mean? It's still polynomial speed up right?
It's a difference of degree. People expect something that "parallelizes well" to show near 1-to-1 speedup. Double the hardware, double the speed. This is "you can always speed it up, but the hardware requirements can increase at any polynomial rate".
Ah got it. Reread previous comment and that makes sense.
Yeah it's more of "on a hypothetical infinitely parallel computer, you'll get a big speedup'.
Which is still useful if you can prove a problem is in NC. It's just not quite as strong as people make it out to be.