Complexity and Tractability
Complexity refers to the time taken to solve the problem. Tractability refers to how difficult it is to solve, if it can’t be solved it is said to be intractable. An example of an intractable problem is the Travelling Salesman problem.
Key Problem
Finding optimal solutions to problems that would take a very long time to find, an example is the Travelling salesman problem, this is an algorithmic problem. It involves a salesman trying to find the shortest route between cities and places without going through the same place twice. It is considered intractable because it would take years to solve it. The number of possible routes can be defined as n! With n being the number of places to go to. If for example n were 10 there would be 36288000 possible routes to be measured, (10! Or 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1) as the number of n goes up so does the number of possible routes. With so many ways to go, finding the most practical way would take ages. You would be finished before you find the answer. Making this problem intractable. This would be the optimal solution but another solution is the “greedy heuristic” solution. This involves finding the closest place from where you are and then next the closest place to where you are, and so on. It is an algorithm that takes “what looks like the best choice at each step.” [1] To repeatedly take the route to the next closest place. If the travelling salesman had a small amount of cities to go to, finding the optimal
studying the individual subsystems e.g., Internet .Also in a complicated system we can predict the
The situation of what is challenging because it is either too complex or just not easy for you to understand. Then assessing the different learning styles, as well as you just may not be good at the subject.For example, in Algebra 2 class when we were learning about exponential
Efficiency: Whatever idea, thought, plan or action we do, must be efficient enough to make us reach our set goal.
As long as the marginal benefit of an activity exceeds the marginal cost, people are better off doing more of it. But as soon as the marginal cost exceeds the marginal benefit, they suddenly become better off doing less of that specific activity. This can be used when deciding how many employees a company should have. To produce the profit-maximizing level of output and hire the optimal number of workers, and other resources, producers must compare the marginal benefits and marginal costs of producing a little more with the marginal benefits and marginal costs of producing a little less. You can decide how many workers to hire for a profit-maximizing car company by
hold onto information better if I could apply the theory to a practical task i.e.
Throughout the entirety of the book, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, author Eliyahu M. Goldratt focuses on demonstrating the importance of the Theory of Constraints and what corporations should do in order to increase profits. A major term used throughout the novel is “throughput,” which according to the text, is “the rate at which the system generates money through sales” (Goldratt 60). Once a bottleneck machine in a production process is identified, there are multiple ways to increase throughput without expanding the physical capacity of the machine.
Economists have often modelled human decision makers as completely rational. According to this model, rational people know their own preferences, gather and accurately process all relevant information, and then make rational choices that advance their own interests. However, Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in economics by pointing out that people are rational, but only boundedly so in that they seldom gather all available information, they often do not accurately process the information
construct a network diagram for a project determine critical path and expected completion time of a project with deterministic task times (note: some of us also do calculations for probabilistic times, but not required) calculate slack times for a particular task know how to “crash” a project down to a certain completion time at the lowest cost (note: just the concept of crashing needs to be discussed and not the calculations; some of us do the calculations, others do not)
You might be thinking that this sounds pretty good. After all, being more efficient is a good thing. Controlled, consistent and measurable outcomes also sound good. So, what 's the problem? It turns out that over-rationalizing a process in this manner can cause irrationality. Which means that a rationalized system may result in events or outcomes that were neither anticipated or desired, and in fact, may not be so good. For example, McDonald 's chain of restaurants. Fast food often turns out to be just the opposite and you have to deal with long waits in lines. Fast food is not necessarily good food either, in fact, McDonald 's food is extremely unhealthy and the taste is average. McDonalds also has issues pertaining to the way their food is made, and also the amount of trash that accumulates from their process.
Perhaps one of the most important points made by Gladwell in this book is that neither analytical nor intuitive thinking is good or bad. But under chaotic conditions, the lesser the information available, the better because information overload can delay decisions, and under pressure, delayed decisions are worse than bad decisions. Gladwell illustrates this with an astonishing example of an experiment where sales of a jam shop were as high as thirty percent more when they had only six types of jam than when they had twenty four.
In field of project management, there are a plethora of mechanisms under perpetual reevaluation. One specific segmentation of project management under such scrutiny pertains to cost duration, which is the time and monetary costs of completing individual tasks within the project’s critical path (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). The process of monitoring and evaluating the time and financial impacts of each task is referred to as cost duration analysis (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). A chief concern of cost duration analysis is identifying tasks within the project’s critical path which can reduce project duration (PMI, 2013). A common approach to reducing a project’s duration is task “crashing” (PMI, p.181). According to The Project Management Institute (2013) crashing refers to the process of methodical determining the financial value of increasing a critical path task’s resources in order to decrease project duration (p.181).
solutions using logical analyses of all the facts. They also tend to identify root causes of
The long run average, or law of large numbers, makes it possible for owners and managers to better visualize how optimal strategies can be formulated in order to lower their costs and increase their systems’ performance and effectiveness.
The boundless possibility of trying out and the instant knowledge of the outcome that stimulates one for further analysis of a rationale in question is what I find most appealing about Computer Science. Keeping up an inquisitive and explorative attitude, I believe, leads to a constant learning process. This approach adds to the already immense potential for innovation that exists in this field.
The difficulties that were accompanied with this approach led to deviation from the rational model. Complexity of modern organizations and the limited cognitive ability of decision makers were most influencing factors in the deviation . The decision makers were unable to operate under perfect rationality conditions. The information about a decision was mostly unavailable or unclear, and open to different interpretations. Also, the criteria of evaluating alternative solutions were not agreed upon. It also required very long time and a lot of energy of the decision makers to pursue a maximizing outcome. These constrains led to a conclusion that the absolute rational model is unreachable.