GoKawiilEssay traces how computer science's definition of 'efficient' lost sight of practical problems
A blog post on argmin examines the history of attempts to formally define algorithmic efficiency in computer science, starting with Jack Edmonds' 1965 paper on finding maximum matchings in graphs. The piece argues that Edmonds struggled to find rigorous language for 'efficient' or 'good' algorithms, distinguishing them from brute-force approaches that scale exponentially with problem size, and that this gap spawned a field of complexity theory that drifted from real-world applications.