On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 09:42:34PM +0100, bearophile wrote: > H. S. Teoh: > > >Combinatorial puzzles come to mind (Rubik's cube solvers and its ilk, > >for example). Maybe other combinatorial problems that require some > >kind of exhaustive state space search. Those things easily go past > >20! once you get beyond the most trivial cases. > > I know many situations/problems where you have more than 20! cases, > but in those problems you don't iterate all permutations, because the > program takes ages to do it. In those programs you don't use > nextPermutation, you scan the search space in a different and smarter > way. > > I don't know of any use case for permuting so large sets of items. [...]
It depends, sometimes in complex cases you have no choice but to do exhaustive search. I agree that it's very rare, though. T -- If creativity is stifled by rigid discipline, then it is not true creativity.
