[williamkuszmaul]

I'm not sure why they claim that the total time grows quadratically.

If tasks arrive arrive randomly at the same average rate as they can be processed, then the amount of time that the nth task will have to wait is proportional to sqrt(n) in expectation. So one would expect a total waiting time of n^1.5, which incidentally fits much better to their plotted curve than n^2 does.

[mwint]

n^1.5 is still quadratic growth.

[mrfox321]

Quadratic is literally x^2

[mwint]

My bad, it’s been a while since algorithms class. I had my orders mixed up.

[Yiin]

the word you're looking for is exponential.

[zorgmonkey]

no the word you are looking for is polynomial, exponential is stuff like 2^n