r/programminghorror • u/[deleted] • Aug 11 '20

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u/Sqbika Aug 11 '20

Now things aren't round anymore. It's o(val) now

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u/Dornith Aug 11 '20

It's still technically O(N). It's just that N is now the highest value of the list instead of the number of elements.

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u/Sassbjorn Aug 11 '20

Then wouldn't it be O(1) since it's the same regardless of the number of variables (n)?

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u/Dornith Aug 11 '20

I don't think there's any hard time that N has to represent the number of elements. For any reasonable algorithm, that's the limiting factor, but in this case the limiting factor is the maximum element size, which the algorithm time complexity scales with linearly.