[seqfan] What do you call an algorithm that is inefficient overall in some cases?

Alonso Del Arte alonso.delarte at gmail.com
Sun Feb 7 23:51:12 CET 2010


What do you call an algorithm that is inefficient overall in some cases, but
never at the level of an individual step? For example, the algorithm
described in A112687 fails to find 2-square solutions for numbers like 32
and 244. But it does work for numbers like 50 and 82. I've looked up both
"greedy algorithm" and "myopic algorithm" in the Oxford Math Dictionary but
neither term seems to apply here.

Al

P. S. PrimeFan's listing of Waring representations remains incomplete even
after the move to Tripod http://primefan.tripod.com/PowerSumsDraft.html. It
seems like he was calculating those by hand but never completed the task.
P. P. S.: I've written my own program (in Mathematica, of course) and
it suggests the following values may be missing from A112687: 167, 192, 219,
248, 279, 288. But given that Luis says he came up with the sequence while
writing a program, I believe that my implementation of the algorithm may be
different in some way.



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