The problem of fast identification of continuous-time systems is formulated in the metric complexity theory setting. It is shown that the two key steps to achieving fast identification, i.e., optimal input design and optimal model selection, can be carried out independently when the true system belongs to a general a priori set. These two optimization problems can be reduced to standard Gel'fand and Kolmogorov n-width problems in metric complexity theory. It is shown that although arbitrarily accurate identification can be achieved on a small time interval by reducing the noise-signal ratio and designing the input carefully, identification speed is limited by the metric complexity of the a priori uncertainty set when the noise/signal ratio is fixed.
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