[dalke]

Well, yes. "fast" can mean "not as slow as doing it by hand in the most naive way possible".

"Faster", now that's a more interesting title if only because it was compared to something else. (Then again, I reviewed one paper which said the algorithm was faster and more memory efficient than the previous version of itself. But with no numbers.)

"Fastest" is of course much harder to pull off. :)

[xaa]

> I reviewed one paper which said the algorithm was faster and more memory efficient than the previous version of itself. But with no numbers.

The aforementioned colleague says he usually editorially rejects those.

Actually another amusing thing about this title is that actually this is not the first time that "ultra-fast" has been used to describe an aligner in a title. The STAR aligner did too.

No sane reviewer or editor would allow "fastest" unless in the context of "provably fastest" which is probably not within the skillset of most bioinformaticians. If it is just "fastest among the currently available tools" then that claim will be out of date within a year.

[dalke]

The one "fastest" I know of is "Fastest Fourier Transform of the West". The abstract for the 1997 paper starts:

> This paper describes FFTW, a portable C package for computing the one- and multidimensional complex discrete Fourier transform (DFT). FFTW is typically faster than all other publicly available DFT software, including the well-known FFTPACK and the code from Numerical Recipes. More interestingly, FFTW is competitive with or better than proprietary, highly-tuned codes such as Sun’s Performance Library and IBM’s ESSL library.

If a "fastest" paper comes in with a good, robust benchmark and tests against the top performing and the most accepted implementations, then it would be worthwhile. And rare as hen's teeth.