How meaningful is the Big-O time complexity of an algorithm?
- by james creasy
Programmers often talk about the time complexity of an algorithm, e.g. O(log n) or O(n^2).
Time complexity classifications are made as the input size goes to infinity, but ironically infinite input size in computation is not used.
Put another way, the classification of an algorithm is based on a situation that algorithm will never be in: where n…