Exponential Growth

``Know your enemy.'' -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

We want to be able to recognize problems or computations that will be intractable, impossible to solve in a reasonable amount of time.

Exponential growth of computation has several names in computer science:

• combinatoric explosion

• NP-complete

• O(2ⁿ)

In real life, things that involve exponential growth usually end badly:

• Atomic bombs
• Cancer
• Population explosion