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Comment by mdxn

People reading this write-up should keep in mind that the author uses the term "complexity class" incorrectly. When the author says this, they actually mean "worst case runtime". It never dives into space complexity, which is yet another complexity measure for evaluating the performance of these operations. In some spots they completely abuse big O notation to make it do things it is not supposed to. For example:

"O(==) is the complexity class for checking whether two values in the list are =="

This stuff needs to be fixed since it is only going to lead to later confusion (and embarrassment).

A complexity class is a set of problems that tend to be similar in resource requirements. O(f(n)), more or less, means asymptotically bounded from above by c*f(n) for some constant, c, as n -> inf. It is a general way to represent the asymptotic growth rate of functions and is NOT married to the concept of complexity classes.

parent mdxn 10 years ago

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