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asking whether someone knows what O(n) means strikes me as a better performance test than trivia like the difference between O(2^n) and O(3^n)

So far that's turning out to be one of the most useful questions, actually... but I wouldn't call it trivia.



Yeah, bad example there. The asymptotic running time of the heap operations, or quicksort runtimes, for example, though, were more like trivia, even though you can basically get them if you know the algorithms and reason about them a bit.

I know the running time of quicksort offhand, but I'd still consult wikipedia on the off chance I'm wrong.




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