Teapot Defined

ziggy on 2004-10-13T04:44:25

Herewith, I define a unit of measure called a teapot.

teapot (n): a measure of problem complexity. A problem of 1-teapot complexity means that the person solving the problem consumes one pot of freshly brewed tea[1] while solving the problem. A problem of 2-teapot complexity takes twice as much tea to solve.

Because I'm a Yankee, I'm not going to get into femto-teapots and peta-teapots. That's just plain silly.

Any problem greater than 4-teapots is probably going to take more than one day to solve. So I declare that a 4-teapot problem takes one day to solve. If you can't drink four pots of tea per day, you're slacking off. If you drink more, you're on the wrong side of a relativistic time dilation.

Many problems are less than 1-teapot in complexity. For those cases, I declare that one teapot contains four (12oz) teamugs.

 

1: Any form of tea will suffice: green tea, oolong, black tea, white tea, tisanes, fruity blends, chai, etc. For best results, start with a loose tea and freshly boiled water.

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sounds very familiar

phillup on 2004-10-13T05:20:25

I was just telling my wife yesterday that the code I'm working on was kicking my butt. I have to modify it to add new functionality.

When I originally wrote the code I was drinking eight 12 ounce cups of very strong coffee a day. Really buzzing... really under pressure... really in the zone.

Now, I've cut back to four 8 ounce cups and feel like I'm at a definite disadvantage.

This also reminds me of a saying I used to use as a sig:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Holmes

Dom2 on 2004-10-13T08:55:43

Sherlock Homes used to call something a three-pipe problem. Thankfully, smoking in the office is not usually an option any more. :)

-Dom

What about Yerba Mate?

schwern on 2004-10-13T16:47:13

You just keep adding water to an existing mug (gourd?) of Mate. Is that schedule slip?

Re:What about Yerba Mate?

ziggy on 2004-10-13T22:00:42

Yerba Mate doesn't count because you don't brew it by the pot. And you can't measure anything significant with it because Mate gourds, like coffee cups at the diner, have two steady states: empty or approximately half full.

/me needs to remember to bring my gourd and some mate to the next perl conference...

Re:What about Yerba Mate?

schwern on 2004-10-17T03:07:50

Mate gourds, like coffee cups at the diner, have two steady states: empty or approximately half full.

Sure sounds like an apt description of a project in distress to me.

Variations on a theme

jhannah on 2004-10-15T11:08:17

See also the one-banana problem.