Polynomial Optimization

Remy Porter

Computers were a mistake, which is why I'm trying to shoot them into space. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF.

Rayer S’s co-worker exploded into his cube, beaming. “I’ve just optimized our processing loop. I’ve gone from O(n²) to O(n)!”

“That’s amazing !” The processing loop in question was easily the most expensive part of the application, and Rayer had been spending too much time finding ways to squeeze a little performance out of it. “How did you do it?”

The original code looked something like this:

for(int i = 0; i < m; ++i) {
    for(int j = 0; j < n; ++j) {
    	process(target[i][j]); //this is really expensive
    }
}

It was a fairly standard nested loop operation.

Radar pulled the new version from source control to see his co-worker’s genius.

for(int i = 0; i < m * n; ++i) {
    process(*((target*)(&target) + i)); 
}

Radar complimented his co-worker on his understanding of C++ pointers, but had some negative things to say about his understanding of basic arithmetic.

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