
Combinatorial Explosion - godelmachine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion
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vidanay
God, I wish I could get my product management team (and indirectly our
customers) to understand this concept when they are constantly asking "can you
just add a configuration parameter for that?"

I swear our software has more possible configuration combinations than there
are known stars.

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motohagiography
It's useful as well for describing tipping points in network effects, the
power of tools or products that have multiple interlinked features and uses,
conditions for non-linear growth, and moving from applicability to enough
specific cases as to become a new form of a general case.

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Yajirobe
What's the point of linking Wikipedia articles here without any
comment/question? What are we supposed to do with it?

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simonh
Find it interesting?

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amelius
I like the Python-way, which allows to iterate over permutations and
combinations without generating everything upfront.

[https://docs.python.org/2/library/itertools.html](https://docs.python.org/2/library/itertools.html)

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saagarjha
So lazy evaluation, really. This can help tame some instances of combinatorial
explosions if you can filter the result enough before you concretize the
result, but if you’re not careful you’ll end up in a long loop just like you
would with an eager method.

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amelius
Yes, use with care.

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yuchi
Now it’s the perfect time to pitch my npm package that helps you with
combinatorial explosions: [https://github.com/yuchi/combinatorial-
explosion](https://github.com/yuchi/combinatorial-explosion)

It has few interesting utilities to explode an array of choices or a tree of
choices.

Also the (very small) source code is heavily annotated:
[https://github.com/yuchi/combinatorial-
explosion/blob/master...](https://github.com/yuchi/combinatorial-
explosion/blob/master/src/index.js)

