Author: Ali Almossawi
-
Recent experiments seem to suggest that babies show as much brain activity in response to a change in an image they are seeing as they do in response to noticeable changes in the number of images they are seeing.
-
It wasn’t until I read books like The Strangest Man* and The Society of Mind that I realized I wasn’t the only one who found that way of thinking useful.
-
Much later, I read The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering and similar books, which talk of the same idea and its implications for insight.
-
The book doesn’t aim to teach you how to better match socks, an intuition that most people will likely already have, but rather to persuade you to turn the mirror on yourself and ask, “I didn’t realize I could think about my socks in that way.”
-
One of my favorite lines about learning comes from Francis Bacon, “That use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended.”
-
mention this at the outset because of the fact that faster methods of solving problems are often faster because they happen to leverage memory.
-
I mention this at the outset because of the fact that faster methods of solving problems are often faster because they happen to leverage memory.
-
The second method, therefore, ends up being faster because of its reliance on memory. More precisely, because of what’s sometimes called a lookup table or cache.
-
Scanning through a line of things, an array, can be time-consuming when the number of things is quite large, reason being that the thing you’re looking for might be at the very end of that line.
-
As we will see later on, most constant-time lookups happen when we are able to model a task by way of a formula, which eliminates the need to step through a task and iterate over all the items at hand.
-
With hash tables, that formula is known as a hash function.