August 2017
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 3m
English
Content preview from A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms
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Ignoring Constants
But here’s the funny thing: in the world of Big O Notation, Selection Sort and Bubble Sort are described in exactly the same way.
Again, Big O Notation describes how many steps are required relative to the number of data elements. So it would seem at first glance that the number of steps in Selection Sort are roughly half of whatever N2 is. It would therefore seem reasonable that we’d describe the efficiency of Selection Sort as being O(N2 / 2). That is, for N data elements, there are N2 / 2 steps. The following table bears this out:
N elements | N2 / 2 | Max # of steps in Selection Sort |
|---|---|---|
5 | 52 / 2 = 12.5 | 14 |
10 | 102 / 2 = 50 | 54 |
20 | 202 / 2 = 200 | 199 |
40 | 402 / 2 = 800 | 819 |
80 | 802 / 2 = 3200 | 3239 |
In reality, however, Selection Sort is described in Big ...
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