March 2012
Beginner
160 pages
4h 6m
English
Content preview from Think ComplexityBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 3. Analysis of Algorithms
Analysis of algorithms is the branch of computer science that studies the performance of algorithms, especially their runtime and space requirements. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_algorithms.
The practical goal of algorithm analysis is to predict the performance of different algorithms in order to guide design decisions.
During the 2008 United States presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama was asked to perform an impromptu analysis when he visited Google. Chief executive Eric Schmidt jokingly asked him for “the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers.” Obama had apparently been tipped off, because he quickly replied, “I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go.” See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8.
This is true: bubble sort is conceptually simple but slow for large datasets. The answer Schmidt was probably looking for is “radix sort” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort).[4]
The goal of algorithm analysis is to make meaningful comparisons between algorithms, but there are some problems:
The relative performance of the algorithms might depend on characteristics of the hardware, so one algorithm might be faster on Machine A, another on Machine B. The general solution to this problem is to specify a machine model and analyze the number of steps (or operations) an algorithm requires under a given model.
Relative performance might depend on the details of the dataset. For ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.