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Subject: Re: O(1) garbage

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 18:42:53 05/11/01

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On May 11, 2001 at 16:43:38, Jesper Antonsson wrote:

>My understanding of this topic is without a doubt as good or better than yours,
>thank you very much. I agree that it is not meaningful to talk about complexity
>for sorting 1000 items, while I don't agree that's comparable to chess. You,
>however, doesn't seem to understand that *depth* was the input considered in the
>start of this argument, and that *chess* is the topic.

It seems you don't understand the point of the O-notation.  It's not supposed to
tell you that algorithm FOO takes time X to run on input BAR.  It's supposed to
let you _estimate_ the running time of algorithm FOO on input BAR+1 (BAR+2,
BAR+3, etc...) when you know the running time on input BAR.  ***You know that
the algorithm will eventually complete, no matter what the input!***  But, for
example, naming a sorting algorithm O(1) says that it will sort 1000000 numbers
just as fast as it sorts 5 numbers.  When you call a tree-searching algorithm
O(1), when depth is the input, you're saying that it takes the same amount of
time to search depth 500 as it does to search depth 3.  Obviously, this is wrong
for any chess program.



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