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Comment by sidarape | Hacker News Reader

I mean, if a paper gives an algorithm, proves its correctness, and you are convinced by the proofs, then you're done. I don't see how implementing the algorithm gives you more insight. I'm doing my master degree in computational geometry and most people in my lab don't even implement their algorithms. They just know they are correct from their proofs.

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Because evaluating algorithms is not always that straight forward. For some algorithms runtime is hugely important, and I don't mean the asymptotic complexity but a hard benchmark of how much it can do in what time span. Stuff like a SLAM algorithm being O(n^2) is nice and all, but to compare it to other SLAM algorithms, I need hard numbers on what it can do in how many milliseconds.

Often, I find that authors don't publish their code. If they do publish their code, they rarely publish their code for their benchmarks.

Yeah sure but at that point, it's more optimization than algorithm design. Of course, with any algorithm, you always have the hidden constant that you must account for. Also, what I was saying does not apply to the entier CS field. It only applies when you try to design an algorithm for a problem that does not yet have an efficient algorithm. I don't have much experience but I don't think it is really hard to see the cost of the hidden constant in most algorithms.

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

— Donald Knuth

(https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/p.vanemdeboas/knuthnote.pdf)

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