11.8 Efficiency of Algorithms: Big O
Searching algorithms all accomplish the same goal—finding an element (or elements) matching a given search key if such an element exists. There are, however, several things that differentiate search algorithms from one another. The major difference is the amount of effort they require to complete the search. One way to describe this effort is with Big O notation, which indicates how hard an algorithm may have to work to solve a problem. For searching and sorting algorithms, this depends mainly on how many data elements there are. In this chapter, we use Big O to describe the worst-case run times for various searching and sorting algorithms.
O(1) Algorithms
Suppose an algorithm is designed to test whether ...
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