this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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the reason it confused me is because the college student was clearly using the algorithm to accomplish his task, not just theoretically designed. So it didn't seem to be a small improvement that would only be noticeable in certain situations.
I'm not smart enough to understand the papers so that's why I asked.
Oh no it's definitely a theoretical paper. Even if the theory is fully formalised and thus executable it still wouldn't give much insight on how it'd perform in the real world because theorem provers aren't the most performant programming languages.
And, FWIW, CS theorists don't really care about running programs same as theoretical physicists don't care much about banging rocks together, in both cases making things work in the real world is up to engineers.
It's really not. Just because they describe their algorithm in computer science terms in the paper, doesn't mean it's theoretical. Their elastic and funnel examples are very clear and pretty simple and can be implemented in any language you like..
Here's a simple python example implementation I found in 2 seconds of searching: https://github.com/sternma/optopenhash/
Here's a rust crate version of the elastic hash: https://github.com/cowang4/elastic_hash_rs
It's not a lot of code to make a hash table, it's a common first year computer science topic.
What's interesting about this isn't that it's a complex theoretical thing, it's that it's a simple undergrad topic that everybody thought was optimised to a point where it couldn't be improved.
When you have a paper that's pretty much a succession of "Lemma:" "Proof:" "Theorem:" and "Proof:" and no benchmark chart then yes it's a theoretical one.
you've misunderstood what I've said, but whatever.