Are you moron or just play one on TV?

Posted Jan 15, 2012 11:42 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

People might tend to take you more seriously if you refrained from resorting to personal insults.

If people expect to be spoon-feed then it's their problem, not mine. I remember ages-old principle errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum very well, thank you very much. I'm human, after all - and sometimes make mistakes. This is why I try to give hints without insults at first. But after few rounds it's time to recall the second part of principle and recall that what we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions.

Yes, the cited section of the Wikipedia article does start out with the assertion that the algorithm can give the median in linear time. However, without already knowing the answer, that is not at all apparent from the remainder of the description.

Well, you actually need to read Wikipedia's article (in particular it's good idea to not skip Proof of O(n) running time and Important notes parts which state quite bluntly that the worst-case algorithm can construct a worst-case O(n log n) quicksort algorithm, by using it to find the median at every step) and think. Is it such a big problem?

Your opponents are not "twitterbrains" just because they expect more authoritative citations…

Yes, they are. This is the very definition of twitterbrain: the person who expect citations. They don't seek hints, they are not interested in proof, they just want authoritative citations to spread them around without thinking.

than a single, rather dense, Wikipedia article without so much as a single hyperlink for further reading.

This “single, rather dense, Wikipedia article” includes:
1. Explanation of the algorithm.
2. Proof of the O(N) complexity.
3. Direct explanation of how the algorithm can be used in quicksort.
More then enough for anyone with more than half a brain. If you don't trust wikipedia then you can just check the included proof - but apparently this is beyond abilities of “twitter generation”.

Note that the Median of Medians algorithm, on its own, does in fact return a result between 30% and 70% of the list, not the true median at 50%.

And now we are back to square one. I know, I know, the temptation to stop thinking and start clicking and copy-pasting is almost irresistible. But please stop for a moment and think: just how the h*ll median of medians algorithm works? It needs to find true median in a smaller (N/5) array. How can it do it if it does not refer any other algorithm and if it can not find median itself? Answer is simple: "median of medians" is intermediate step which guarantees that recursive call will have less then 70% of elements to deal with. This is where T(n/5) + O(n) in T(n) ≤ T(n/5) + T(7n/10) + O(n) formula comes from. But this is not the end result! The end result is kth largest element (and median is, of course, N/2th largest element thus it can be produced by algorithm directly). This is where T(7n/10) in the aforementioned formula comes from.

Is it so hard to understand?