> If algorithmic theorists don't care about practical performance then why should we care about what they're doing? It's just a strange game they're playing, of no interest to anyone else.

You don't need to care. But every so often breakthroughs in theory can be turned into breakthroughs in practice.

> It seems like rather than coming up with more "galactic" algorithms, a more useful thing to do might be to come up with a replacement for big-O that's not so exploitable, and to convince theoreticians to play that game instead.

There's plenty of replacements.

Btw, we already have the optimal (in big-O terms) algorithm for every NP hard problem. We just don't know whether it runs in polynomial time or takes longer. And, yes, that algorithm called Levin's Universal Search is a galactic algorithm. Simplifying a lot, Levin's Universal Search does some clever interleaving to essentially try all possible algorithms in sort-of parallel.

Lo and behold, even the theorists you complain about don't see that 'loophole' as a solution, declare victory and go home. They still keep researching.

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skybrian 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If Big-O lets you run every possible algorithm in "parallel" while still being in some sense "optimal," that seems like yet another exploit?

	▲	retsibsi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As I read it, that was sort of their point: if the theorists were blindly focused on Big O complexity, they could 'cheat' by invoking the universal search algorithm as a good-enough solution to a huge class of problems; but they don't, because they're not mindlessly playing a game where Big O complexity is all that matters.