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I think his point was that if you're seeking out all the pairs when you curl them together, you're still spending unnecessary time and effort matching socks, just ahead of time instead of in the moment when you need socks

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Exactly he does an O(N^2) Pair followed by a later O(N) search.

Why not do a O(1) Pair folloed by an O(1) Search.

Of course, there's an enlightening stackoverflow question on this: http://stackoverflow.com/q/14415881/220347

Finally, my graduate-level algorithms class comes in handy in real life.

Intuitively I'd say a human pairing socks is far better than O(n2) because finding something that matches a given sock is close to O(1) on small sets.

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