Holy cow! Can you believe your luck? What better way to spend some portion of whatever day of the week it is than to think about parallelizing reduction algorithms?

Really? You can't think of one? In that case, I'll kick off our inevitable friendship by contributing a clojure implementation of a fancy algorithm that asynchronously reduces arbitrary input streams while preserving order. Then I'll scare you with glimpses of my obsessive quest to visualize what this algorithm is actually doing; if you hang around, I'll show you what I eventually cobbled together with clojurescript and reagent. (Hint. It's an ANIMATION …

In honor of !!con, I was trying to think of programming-relevant uses of double exclamation marks. Other than denoting the end of a particularly funny programming joke (for example, a mangled homage to a famous paper), it seemed the best place to look might be in the world of double factorials. As it turns out, that wasn't as fruitful as I'd hoped, but I learned something interesting on the way to finding that out, and here it is.

TL;DR

You can learn interesting things about the order of complexity of an algorithm without knowing anything about how it works …