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If your program does two steps, one of which takes time O(n) and the other O(√n), then your program takes time O(n) because that dominates. That's an example of lower order terms. If you measure wall-clock time, then you'd be interested to know about that second step. But if you're looking at asymptotic analysis, then it's completely irrelevant because the linear term dominates it. Your other questions are all best answered by: Big-O notation is not the right tool if you want to make predictions about wall-clock time. I don't think I need to justify why someone interested in wall-clock time would be very interested in the constant factors involved - the difference between n and 20n is a factor of twenty, and whether a program takes half a second or ten does make quite the difference. But asymptotically, they're the same. Someone who is interested in the asymptotic behaviour wants to know how fast the function grows - is it linear? linearithmic? quadratic? cubic? exponential? (with which base - 1.1^n, 2^n, 10^n?). For them, a constant factor isn't interesting. Of course, neither extreme is particularly helpful when trying to compare algorithms in practice. Modelling the hardware extensively and including all the little constant factors is exceedingly tedious, even if you can actually get all the information required to do so. Pure asymptotics also don't help much if they hide huge constant factors. That's why Algorithm Engineering is a thing (and a very good thing!). Basically, it tries to bridge the gap between algorithms that theorists like, and those that practitioners use. To that end, design, analysis, implementation, and experimentation must form a circle and influence each other. Wikipedia probably does a better job of explaining it, though. |