How do I explain what a “naive implementation” is? [closed]

Answer 1

Bubble sort over 100,000 thousand entries.

Answer 2

I took the time to read your question a little closer, and I have the perfect example.

a good clear example which will illustrate -- ideally, even to non-technical people -- that the naive implementation may technically be a functioning solution to the problem, but practically be utterly unusable.

Try Bogosort!

If bogosort were used to sort a deck of cards, it would consist of checking if the deck were in order, and if it were not, one would throw the deck into the air, pick up the cards up at random, and repeat the process until the deck is sorted.

Answer 3

The intuitive algorithms you normally use to sort a deck of cards (insertion sort or selection sort, both O(n^2)) can be considered naive, because they are easy to learn and implement, but would not scale well to a deck of, say, 100000 cards :D . In a general setting, there are faster (O(n log n)) ways to sort a list.

Note, however, that naive does not necessarily mean bad. There are situations where insertion sort is a good choice (say, when you have an already sorted big deck and few unsorted cards to add).

Answer 4

Naive doesn't mean bad or unusable - it means having certain qualities which pose a problem in a specific context and for a specific purpose.

The classic example of course is sorting. In the context of sorting a list of ten numbers, any old algorithm (except pogo sort) would work pretty well. However, when we get to the scale of thousands of numbers or more, typically we say that selection sort is the naive algorithm because it has the quality of O(n^2) time which would be too slow for our purposes, and that the non-naive algorithm is quicksort because it has the quality of O(n lg n) time which is fast enough for our purposes.

In fact, the case could be made that in the context of sorting a list of ten numbers, quicksort is the naive algorithm, since it will take longer than selection sort.

Answer 5

Naive implementation is:

• intuitive;
• first to come in mind;
• often inffective and/or buggy incorner cases;

Answer 6

I'd try to keep it away from computers altogether. Ask your audience how they find an entry in a dictionary. (A normal dictionary of word definitions.)

The naive implementation is to start at the very beginning, and look at the first word. Oh, that's not the word we're looking for - look at the next one, etc. It's worth pointing out to the audience that they probably didn't even think of that way of doing things - we're smart enough to discount it immediately! It is, however, about the simplest way you could think of. (It might be interesting to ask them whether they can think of anything simpler, and check that they do really understand why it's simpler than the way we actually do it.)

The next implementation (and a pretty good one) is to start in the middle of the dictionary. Does the word we're looking for come before or after that? If it's before, turn to the page half way between the start and where we are now - otherwise, turn to the page half way between where we are now and the end, etc - binary chop.

The actual human implementation is to use our knowledge of letters to get very rapidly to "nearly the right place" - if we see "elephant" then we'll know it'll be "somewhere near the start" maybe about 1/5th of the way through. Once we've got to E (which we can do with very, very simple comparisons) we find EL etc.