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by thethirdone 2521 days ago
> And if you ignore the bottom half of the centaur, it's just a dude playing a flute. :)

That is an excellent phrase.

> We shouldn't be confusing people that actually want to learn about this stuff.

I definitely agree that Selection sort should definitely not be described as O(n) to beginners. I was just pointing out a subtly. In the strange case where memory writes are much more expensive than reads or comparisons, it is correct to say the Selection sort takes O(n) time.

1 comments

I'm not sure what conditions you have in mind, but in the selection sort, the comparisons are O(n^2), and the assignments are O(n).

If comparisons are a fixed, non-zero cost, and assignments are a fixed, non-zero cost, then the comparisons in your selection sort will always overwhelm the assignments, and I can tell you at exactly which input size.

https://gist.github.com/mrami4/56d6e234f34787b8c5daf543a299a...