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An algorithm is said to be constant time (also written as () time) if the value of () (the complexity of the algorithm) is bounded by a value that does not depend on the size of the input. For example, accessing any single element in an array takes constant time as only one operation has to be performed to locate it.
Also, when implemented with the "shortest first" policy, the worst-case space complexity is instead bounded by O(log(n)). Heapsort has O(n) time when all elements are the same. Heapify takes O(n) time and then removing elements from the heap is O(1) time for each of the n elements. The run time grows to O(nlog(n)) if all elements must be distinct.
In computer science, the analysis of algorithms is the process of finding the computational complexity of algorithms—the amount of time, storage, or other resources needed to execute them. Usually, this involves determining a function that relates the size of an algorithm's input to the number of steps it takes (its time complexity ) or the ...
Therefore, the time complexity, generally called bit complexity in this context, may be much larger than the arithmetic complexity. For example, the arithmetic complexity of the computation of the determinant of a n × n integer matrix is O ( n 3 ) {\displaystyle O(n^{3})} for the usual algorithms ( Gaussian elimination ).
An early example of algorithm complexity analysis is the running time analysis of the Euclidean algorithm done by Gabriel Lamé in 1844. Before the actual research explicitly devoted to the complexity of algorithmic problems started off, numerous foundations were laid out by various researchers.
This includes the memory space used by its inputs, called input space, and any other (auxiliary) memory it uses during execution, which is called auxiliary space. Similar to time complexity, space complexity is often expressed asymptotically in big O notation, such as (), (), (), (), etc., where n is a characteristic of the input influencing ...
The order of growth (e.g. linear, logarithmic) of the worst-case complexity is commonly used to compare the efficiency of two algorithms. The worst-case complexity of an algorithm should be contrasted with its average-case complexity, which is an average measure of the amount of resources the algorithm uses on a random input.
There are often general hierarchies of complexity classes; for example, it is known that a number of fundamental time and space complexity classes relate to each other in the following way: L⊆NL⊆P⊆NP⊆PSPACE⊆EXPTIME⊆NEXPTIME⊆EXPSPACE (where ⊆ denotes the subset relation).