optimisation
3 free lessons tagged optimisation across Business, Computer Science. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
The Schedule Problem: Impact Against Timing Risk
Trading fast costs impact. Trading slowly exposes the order to drift. Neither can be minimised without worsening the other, so the schedule is an optimisation with a parameter that encodes urgency. This lesson builds that trade-off, derives the shape of the resulting trajectory, and identifies what the model cannot see.
Designing a Dynamic Program: State, Transition, Order
Writing a dynamic program is three decisions, not a recurrence to memorise. This lesson works through choosing the state, deriving the running time from it, fixing the evaluation order, recovering the answer rather than its value, and why an O(nW) knapsack is not polynomial.
Why Most Code Is Memory Bound: The Roofline Model
Most real code never approaches a processor's arithmetic peak because it cannot be fed fast enough. The roofline model makes that concrete: plot operational intensity against achievable performance and the binding constraint becomes visible. This lesson covers the model, bandwidth versus latency, and the layout changes that follow.