[Dylan16807]

I know what it means, and I stand by it being limited to the point of misleading in a case like this.

Running any (halting) algorithm on a human computer is constant time, because you're bound by the number of states you can fit into some terabytes, but nobody should actually try to use that as a final analysis.

[daveFNbuck]

> Running any (halting) algorithm on a human computer is constant time, because you're bound by the number of states you can fit into some terabytes, but nobody should actually try to use that as a final analysis.

That's the sort of thing I would usually say to explain why we do things like use asymptomatic analysis and ignore polynomial factors. If you have a different solution, that's great, but you're no longer taking about the kind of runtime the article is about.

[Dylan16807]

It depends on how abstract you want to be. You shouldn't always shove the lever all the way to the most abstract single value.

My suggested solution is "don't delete all nuance". If the runtime doesn't behave nicely, give that a mention. Most things do behave nicely, so that's not much of a burden.

> the kind of runtime the article is about

The article spends plenty of time talking about computational feasibility, which is not about the limits as you approach infinity.

It even equates P with "trivial", which is... not good.