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Comment by mschuetz | Hacker News Reader

It is kind of weird and unintuitive. This one here, posted by another commenter, is much much more understandable: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MatrixMultComplexity...

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It is only unintuitive if your mental representation of time flows to the right.

We all create a mental model of time at some point in our life, and then stick to it - often without ever talking about it to anyone.

But the representations vary substantially between people. Many people might have a timeline where the past is on the left and the future is on the right - maybe along the reading direction. But for some, future expands to the left. For others, future expands in front of them while the past is behind them (quite inconvenient).

It can make for a great party conversation to explore each others‘ timelines.

If there are parties, that is.

Are there areas of the world where that isn't the taught approach to the visualization of time? I've lived in only a small variety of countries but that's been pretty consistently taught from what I've seen. Some people may mentally model it in a different way but society seems to have settled on that specific approach and so most of the graphs we'll see and publish will follow it.

I have not seen this being taught. At least where I‘m coming from you had to figure this out on your own. And I guess most people settle to draw the arrow of time in reading direction. I wouldn‘t be surprised if future is to the left in Arabic countries.

The WP image has an unfortunate offset on the Y axis, giving the impression that we're much closer to optimal than we actually are.

We don’t know this. I think a lot of people expect that there’s an O(n^(2+eps)) algorithm for any epsilon > 0, but that’s conjecture; we might already be at the optimum.

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