The act of rendering optimal

Usage examples of optimization.

Loop involvement, which was the preparatory-stage management strategy, was a grand forward-looking idea, but after four decades of accumulated optimization the Third Fleet software had become classic bloatware, total deadweight.

Pure topological theory might prove the existence of a decomposition series, but actually forcing a ship through that series required massive linear programming optimizations, all performed in realtime with no second chances for mistakes.

Ordinarily, genetic algorithms—which modeled reproduction to arrive at solutions—ordinarily, they ran between 500 and 5,000 generations to arrive at an optimization.

And for the nonsimple cases—like Namqem—where generations of clever optimization finally crushed itself, even those disasters depended on the closed-system nature of sessile civilizations.

That concept turned the problem of locating Acorna's home world from a straightforward task of astrophysical analysis to a complex optimization program requiring sophisticated operations research techniques.

The ship's metachip-augmented parallel processors solved and optimized the set of equations represented in a thousand-square matrix of subspace points, dropped out of that subspace into Decomposition, rode the collapsing funnel of spaces with a new optimization problem to choose and resolve every tenth of a second.

Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility.

Windows 2000 took more than 20 seconds longer to boot, because it's much larger than Windows Me, and because XP uses new optimizations for reading and loading OS code into memory.

And there are many tweaks and optimizations that I could probably make in my system that I have never gotten around to attempting, partly because I get tired of being a Morlock some days, and partly because I am afraid of fouling up a system that generally works well.

Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human – human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments.