The Dude abides.

Posted
6 January 2008

Tagged
Humour
Technology

The Slim Shady Algorithm

The Uncyclopedia has its moments. Consider the hilarious Slim Shady Algorithm:

When faced with a large group of similar looking people, the Slim-Shady Algorithm can be applied to deduce which member of the group is the authentic person whom you are seeking.

The algorithm is applied by simply announcing “Won’t the real X please stand up” over and over again (where X denotes the name of the person you are seeking) until the real person stands up.

… The algorithm runs in O(N) time, which makes it a linear-running algorithm. A more complex version can achieve O(log N) efficiency, but this requires the use of a tree. Note that there is an overhead cost associated with cutting down the tree to get the log.

An implementation is given in PHP:

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 require_once('libshady.php');
 global $shadies;
 $standing_up = 0;
 $real_slim_shady = false;
 
 foreach ($shadies as $shady) {
 	if (!$standing_up) {
 		echo "<marquee><blink><big><big><big>Won't the real Slim Shady please stand up?</big></big></big></blink></marquee>";
 		$real_slim_shady = assess_shadiness($shady);
 		if ($real_slim_shady){
 			$standing_up++;
 		}
 	} else {
 		if ($standing_up &gt; 1) {
 			trigger_error("Multiple shadies found.  This can't be right", E_USER_ERROR);
 		} else {
 			exit("ICE ICE BABY!");
 		}
 	}
 }

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