HACKER Q&A
📣 meffmadd

What is the most complicated Algorithm you came up with yourself?


Hi HN, what was the most complex and sophisticated algorithm you came up with yourself while working on a problem?


  👤 aleda145 Accepted Answer ✓
I'd say nothing has beaten the association rules + graph search I did for my thesis about restocking an automated picking machine in a warehouse (https://github.com/aleda145/product_allocation_aframe)

code: https://github.com/aleda145/product_allocation_aframe/blob/m...

I'm not proud of this code, but it yielded 0.2% better result than the naive approach!


👤 pants2
An auto-arrange feature for a LabVIEW/ComfyUI type DAG programming language. Could take a program with hundreds of nodes and edges and arrange them nicely so none of the lines intersected and blocks were grouped logically.

👤 mikewarot
Long, long ago I came up with a text search algorithm while working on PCxRef to help technical sales support at IBM. My first approach using a naive string search took about 30 seconds on a PC. My algorithm got it down to the speed of disk access.

Basically I precomputed a table of masks and used the XLAT instruction in a very tight loop to fly though all the product descriptions for everything IBM offered back around 1983. I could accommodate case insensitivity and single character wildcards.

The test search was always "dos tech ref" to find the IBM DOS Technical reference manual.


👤 mmphosis
diff in a text editor

👤 lurker919
Javascript logic for a clickable three.js 3d menu / world environment with animated planets going on their own trajectories.