I don’t think that anyone is claiming that it’s a particularly useful metric, just that it’s an interesting constraint for programming puzzles.
There are sometimes corresponding constraints in reality, such as systems with comparatively low amounts of RAM where data can be requested (e.g. embedded systems with I/O, servers with network APIs, etc) but data can not or should not be written via those channels. It doesn’t make them common, but it is useful to be able to devise algorithms under these or other constraints.
I’m still skeptical that this algorithm is useful any real-world situation, although I was hoping I might get comments with counter-examples. Even in the examples you gave, you already have another machine that clearly has far more memory than you need to implement the set algorithm but for some reason you have to write this algorithm to run on a toaster and talk to your dramatically more powerful server over the network? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I hope you can see why I’m skeptical.
I don’t think that anyone is claiming that it’s a particularly useful metric, just that it’s an interesting constraint for programming puzzles.
There are sometimes corresponding constraints in reality, such as systems with comparatively low amounts of RAM where data can be requested (e.g. embedded systems with I/O, servers with network APIs, etc) but data can not or should not be written via those channels. It doesn’t make them common, but it is useful to be able to devise algorithms under these or other constraints.
I agree that the math puzzle is interesting.
I’m still skeptical that this algorithm is useful any real-world situation, although I was hoping I might get comments with counter-examples. Even in the examples you gave, you already have another machine that clearly has far more memory than you need to implement the set algorithm but for some reason you have to write this algorithm to run on a toaster and talk to your dramatically more powerful server over the network? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I hope you can see why I’m skeptical.