From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Brute \Brute\, a. [F. brut, nasc., brute, fem., raw, rough,
rude, brutish, L. brutus stupid, irrational: cf. It. & Sp.
bruto.]
1. Not having sensation; senseless; inanimate; unconscious;
without intelligence or volition; as, the brute earth; the
brute powers of nature.
[1913 Webster]
2. Not possessing reason, irrational; unthinking; as, a brute
beast; the brute creation.
[1913 Webster]
A creature . . . not prone
And brute as other creatures, but endued
With sanctity of reason. --Milton.
[1913 Webster]
3. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of, a brute beast.
Hence: Brutal; cruel; fierce; ferocious; savage; pitiless;
as, brute violence. --Macaulay.
[1913 Webster]
The influence of capital and mere brute labor.
--Playfair.
[1913 Webster]
4. Having the physical powers predominating over the mental;
coarse; unpolished; unintelligent.
[1913 Webster]
A great brute farmer from Liddesdale. --Sir W.
Scott.
[1913 Webster]
5. Rough; uncivilized; unfeeling. [R.]
[1913 Webster]
{brute force}, The application of predominantly physical
effort to achieve a goal that could be accomplished with
less effort if more carefully considered. Figuratively,
repetitive or strenuous application of an obvious or
simple tactic, as contrasted with a more clever stratagem
achieving the same goal with less effort; -- as, the first
prime numbers were discovered by the brute force
repetition of the {Sieve of Eratosthenes}.
[PJC]
From The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003) [jargon]:
brute force
adj.
Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies
on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own
intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and
applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The
term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force
programs are written in a heavyhanded, tedious way, full of repetition and
devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also {brute force and
ignorance}).
The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the
?traveling salesman problem? (TSP), a classical {NP-}hard problem: Suppose
a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what
order should the cities be visited in order to minimize the distance
travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes
and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to
implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even
obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San
Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but
it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there
are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000
? well, see {bignum}). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general
solution than brute force. See also {NP-} and {rubber-hose cryptanalysis}.
A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the
smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort
the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the
front.
Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not
depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU
time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time
it would take to develop a more ?intelligent? algorithm. Additionally, a
more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and
bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement.
Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered the epigram
?When in doubt, use brute force?. He probably intended this as a {ha ha
only serious}, but the original Unix kernel's preference for simple,
robust, and portable algorithms over {brittle} ?smart? ones does seem to
have been a significant factor in the success of that OS. Like so many
other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and
complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires
both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment.
|
