C-HD algorithm beats Dijkstra only narrowly in an exotic regime, prompting RSI skepticism

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-09-23

A blog post introducing the C-HD pathfinding algorithm claimed it beats Dijkstra, but a follow-up analysis shows the improvement holds only in an exotic regime: most real road networks fall in regimes where the 2026 algorithm or plain Dijkstra remains the relevant benchmark, and the comparison uses theoretical asymptotic bounds rather than actual runtime — C-HD may still be slower in practice.

teortaxesTex draws a broader lesson: if 'better than Dijkstra' is this narrow, Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) may be less dramatic than imagined — we don't know how close the best human algorithms already are to algorithmic limits. Or maybe they aren't.

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →