Steven S. Skiena > Quotes

“It has all the right ingredients: rich contents, friendly, personal language, subtle humor, the right references, and a plethora of pointers to resources.”
― Steven S. Skiena, Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual

“In algorithms, as in life, persistence usually pays off.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual

“The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual

“It is amazing how often the reason you can't find a convincing explanation for something is because your conclusion is wrong.”
― Steven S. Skiena

“Problem-solving is not a science, but part art and part skill. It is one of the skills most worth developing.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual

“The combinatorial explosion was first recognized with the legend that the inventor of chess demanded as payment one grain of rice for the first square of the board, and twice as much for the (i + 1)st square than the ith square. The king was astonished to learn he had to cough up 6412'=265-1=36,893,488,147,419,103,231 grains of rice. In beheading the inventor, the wise king first established pruning as a technique for dealing with the combinatorial explosion.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual

“All non-printable characters have either the first three bits as zero or all seven lowest bits as one.”
― Steven S. Skiena, Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual

“Naturally occurring processes are often informally modeled by priority queues. Single people maintain a priority queue of potential dating candidates, mentally if not explicitly. One’s impression on meeting a new person maps directly to an attractiveness or desirability score, which serves as the key field for inserting this new entry into the “little black book” priority queue data structure. Dating is the process of extracting the most desirable person from the data structure (Find-Maximum), spending an evening to evaluate them better, and then reinserting them into the priority queue with a possibly revised score.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual