Not everything can be done in constant time, that's O(k)

alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 394 points –
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You have two lists of size n. You want to find the permutations of these two lists that minimizes a certain distance function between them.

Surely you could implement this via a sorting algorithm? If you can prove the distance function is a metric and both lists contains elements from the same space under that metric, isn’t the answer to sort both?

It's essentially the traveling salesman problem