Back in high school, I thought I was the most badass programmer on this planet. Could hand assemble code and hyper-optimize my programs counting clock cycles everywhere. I got into college. There was a book on algorithms in the small library the computer room had. I learned about asymptotic behavior. So I realized that my cleverly optimized O(n^2) sorting assembly program was going to eventually lose badly to a straightforward interpreted implementation of quicksort. Clearly I had to become good at this. I started reading all books I could find on the topic and very quickly I noticed that they all included a sentence meaning "If you want to understand the subtle underpinnings of this, see TAOCP." So I got a copy of volumes 1 & 3. It was expensive (I was not in USA and books were VERY expensive because of currency exchange issues). Mom & Dad chipped in and I still thank them for that. I borrowed volume 2 from a friend.

I decided to go though the book solving all exercises up to level 30. Saturday was my TAOCP day. I cannot say I read ALL of the text nor that I solved ALL problems of difficulty below 30, but I solved all that I tried and they were way more than a few. I even solve some in the 35 level, whenever I considered them interesting.

FF to the beginning my PhD studies at a good school in the USA: When taking the grad level Algorithms class, I was doing VERY well. The professor, a scary smart guy (now full professor at Stanford) asked me how may courses on algorithms and information theory I had taken. The answer was none. My undergrad degree was in Systems Engineering, from a crappy school in South America. I was never formally taught what a big-Oh was. That professor become my thesis advisor. He used to joke saying I was a walking encyclopedia of algorithms.

Will it work for everybody? Probably not. If you want to do theoretical CS, as I did, you will have to handle that math and some more anyways. CLR is more up to date and time efficient for learning. If you want to be a software engineer, chances are you are not going to be doing the heavy math, you will be using off the shelf algorithms.

Still TAOCP is a hell of a reference. Funny thing is, after finishing my PhD, I browsed through it. It looked simple, not very formal at all. I guess PhD does mean "permanently head damaged" :-)

Here you have one.

http://www.glensideccc.com/coc...

Nitpick: O(2n)=O(1.7n)

I always thought that Wiley Coyote depicts very well the agony of working as an engineer. The laws of nature seem to work against you. Murphy's laws are against you. The tools/equipment do not behave according to the specs, and tend to fail at the worst possible time. Good ideas fail because of implementation details or even bad luck. Yet, you cannot let the problem go, you have to fix it! One last try, ok, maybe another one!

NP is short for Natalie Portman, and the car analogy follows:

Adleman's chief scientist, Nickolas Chelyapov, offered this illustration: Imagine that a fussy customer walks onto a million-car auto square and gives the dealer a complicated list of criteria for the car he wants.

"First," he says, "I want it to be either a Cadillac or a convertible or red." Second, "if it is a Cadillac, then it has to have four seats or a locking gas cap." Third, "If it is a convertible, it should not be a Cadillac or it should have two seats."

The customer rattles off a list of 24 such conditions, and the salesman has to find the one car in stock that meets all the requirements. (Adleman and his team chose a problem they knew had exactly one solution.) The salesman will have to run through the customer's entire list for each of the million cars in turn -- a hopeless task unless he can move and think at superhuman speed.

This serial method is the way a digital electronic computer solves such a problem.

What if you are depending on a library written by someone not as fscking brilliant as yourself? If that library has a bug and throws an exception you will have to deal with it. You may even have to propagate the exception up to be handled by someone else. That may require some cleanup.

Besides, bugs are not the only conditions to trigger exceptions. Unusual but possible events can do it as well. Out of disk or memory conditions are such examples. Some idiot/rogue user may delete a needed file from the command line and so forth.

I'm going to review your physics.

If you installation produced 45 KWH of ENERGY during a 5 hour period (being conservative here), it's average output POWER was 9KW. Let's say 10KW to simplify the math.
Now, you will need 11000 times as many panels to reach 110MW. The total number of panels per mile you need is 48*11000/116=4551. That is one panel every 14 inches (if i got the units right, not used to imperial).

Feasible? I would say it still is, but not as much as your calculations suggested