I concur, the theory is not necessary to understand how to use it. Perhaps it is counter-intuitive and one would like hone their intuition. Still there are much better approaches to developing an adequate intuition than the theory, this is why traditional Math textbooks rely on exposition first, to establish the context of the theory...
it does not imply that no concrete methodologies would help us, but rather they will all fail at truly capturing the theory built by the programmer, as per the author.
This article explicitly states that it only applies to a subset of Vegetarianism, namely Ethical Consequentialist Vegetarianism. Ipso facto, it does not apply to the entirety of Vegetarianism, hence the explicit disclaimer in the introduction.
True. This is what I meant by confusing, without properly defining the variables at play, in this context, k is the index of the element of the ordered list, and not the kth smallest element.
Context can be clarified by writing: "Quickselect is a selection algorithm to find the INDEX OF THE kth smallest element in an unordered list. It is closely related to the quicksort sorting algorithm."
Cost of the machine is amortized over the number of e-mail sent, in other words OP is more interested in the average cost of sending an e-mail message, using statistical approximation... (i.e.: sending an e-mail from USA to China on average requires x amount of servers, middle-servers, data-centers, and these process y amount of requests per minute, with a cost of operation of z on average per minute, etc.)
By sick, you mean can it become bias to a subspace in the solution space, if so you would "cure" it by re-defining your fitness function to not get "stuck", or fooled by a local maxima.
DES : - (Matsui, M. (1994, January). Linear cryptanalysis method for DES cipher. In Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT’93 (pp. 386-397). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.)
- Biham, E., & Shamir, A. (1991). Differential cryptanalysis of DES-like cryptosystems. Journal of CRYPTOLOGY, 4(1), 3-72.
AES : - Billet, O., Gilbert, H., & Ech-Chatbi, C. (2005, January). Cryptanalysis of a white box AES implementation. In Selected Areas in Cryptography (pp. 227-240). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
- Bogdanov, A., Khovratovich, D., & Rechberger, C. (2011). Biclique cryptanalysis of the full AES. In Advances in Cryptology–ASIACRYPT 2011 (pp. 344-371). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.