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by andrepd 2208 days ago
Author knows that:

> To achieve agreement when discussing the speed of a sorting algorithm, it’s necessary to establish some common ground. How do we measure speed? There is a well-established model – the von Neumann computer, or unit-cost RAM model – widely used by computer scientists to evaluate algorithms without introducing all the complexities of real-world computers. This model doesn’t account for some important things, such as the performance gap between RAM and CPU, but typically gives good approximations of real-life performance.