I’ve studied complexity theory and I come from a solid programming background and it’s always seemed odd that so many things seem to run in times that are intrinsic to humans. I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas as to why this is?
I’m generally speaking of times in the range of 1 second to 1 hour. If you consider how narrow that span of time is proportional the the billions of operations per second a computer can handle, it seems odd that such a large number of things fall into that category.
A few examples:
Encoding video: 20 minutes
Checking for updates: 5 seconds
Starting a computer: 45 seconds
You get the idea…
Don’t you think most things should fall into one of two categories: instantaneous / millions of years?
Given that computers are tools, and tools are meant to be setup, used, and have their results analyzed by humans (mostly), it makes sense that the majority of operations would be created in a way that didn’t take longer than the lifespan of a typical human.
I would argue that most single operations are effectively “instantaneous” (in that they run in less than perceptible time), but are rarely used as a single operation. Humans are capable of creating complexity, and given that many computational operations intrinsically contain a balance between speed and some other factor (quality, memory usage, etc), it actually makes sense that many operations are designed in a way where that balance places them into a “times that are intrinsic to humans”. However, I’d personally word that as “a time that is assumed to be acceptable to a human user, given the result generated.”