Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> writes: > On 9/1/2010 8:11 PM, John Bokma wrote:
[...] > Right. And if 'small values of n' include all possible values, then > rejecting a particular O(log n) algorithm as 'unacceptable' relative > to all O(1) algorithms is pretty absurd. I have little time, but want to reply to this one: anyone using big-Oh and claiming that an O(log n) algorithm is 'unacceptable' relative to all O(1) algorithms has no clue what he/she is talking about. big-Oh says something about the order of /growth/ of the running time of an algorithm. And since 1 is a constant O(1) means that the order of /growth/ of the running time is constant (independend of the input size. Since "the growth of the running time is constant" is quite a mouth full, it's often shortened to 'constant time' since from the context it's clear what's being meant. But this doesn't mean that if the algorithm gets an input size of 100000 versus 1 that it takes the same number of seconds for the latter to process. -- John Bokma j3b Blog: http://johnbokma.com/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/j.j.j.bokma Freelance Perl & Python Development: http://castleamber.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
