Читать книгу Algorithms For Dummies - John Paul Mueller, John Mueller Paul, Luca Massaron - Страница 20

Using algorithms is all about getting an acceptable answer. The reason you look for an acceptable answer is that some algorithms generate more than one answer in response to fuzzy input data. Life often makes precise answers impossible to get. Of course, getting a precise answer is always the goal, but often you end up with an acceptable answer instead.

Getting the most precise answer possible may take too much time. When you seek a precise answer that takes too long to obtain, the information becomes useless and you’ve wasted your time. Choosing between two algorithms that address the same issue may come down to a choice between speed and precision. A fast algorithm may not generate a precise answer, but the answer may still work well enough to provide useful output.

Wrong answers can be a problem. Creating a lot of wrong answers fast is just as bad as creating a lot of precisely correct answers slowly. Part of the focus of this book is helping you find the middle ground between too fast and too slow, and between inaccurate and too accurate. Even though your math teacher stressed the need for providing the correct answer in the way expressed by the book you used at the time, real-world math often involves weighing choices and making middle-ground decisions that affect you in ways you might not think possible.