Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Clear questions and runnable code
get the best and fastest answer


by plaid (Chaplain)
on Aug 03, 2000 at 01:45 UTC ( #25861=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??


The Big-O notation doesn't work in such a simple way as taking the complexity of two algorithms and comparing them directly like that. Big-O notation relies heavily on exactly what 'N' is. Just because two algorithms are O(N) or O(N^2) doesn't mean a thing, because in one algorithm, N could be a large, time-consuming mathematical calculation, and in the other N could be a simple regular expression.

The power of Big-O notation comes with being able to roughly be able to predict how an algorithm will act on different sizes of datasets, and taking that information and tailoring your algorithm to get the best performance based on the fastest running time of the average-sized set of data. If one algorithm is O(N), and the other is O(N^2), the latter may be a better choice in some cases, if the former has a much larger N, and you can ensure that there won't be too much data to negate the smaller N.

Basically, it all boils down to the necessity of doing much more testing than you did. The best efficiency takes many steps to reach. If you did more benchmarks with different numbers of IP addresses, different complexity algorithms, and things like that, you'd start to see how the Big-O notation would help you predict future tests.

RE: RE: Sorting a list of IP addresses (aka Why I hate Big O)
by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 08, 2000 at 01:07 UTC
    There is a very interesting point about Perl and algorithmic efficiency. Perl makes it very natural for people to use highly optimized pattern recognition algorithms in the regular expression engine, and a good hashing algorithm.

    C, while much faster, makes it far more natural to repeatedly scan lists rather than store a key in a hash and just check exists.

    The result is that the same person in many circumsances will find that their Perl code not only is easier to write and read, but outperforms what they would have written in C. Sure, if they wrote their C carefully they would beat Perl every time. But natural Perl idioms tend to be better algorithmically than the natural C approaches, and algorithmic efficiency trumps raw performance.

    (This does not hold true for all programmers, YMMV, etc. But it is surprising how often it is true.)

Log In?

What's my password?
Create A New User
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://25861]
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this? | Other CB clients
Other Users?
Others avoiding work at the Monastery: (4)
As of 2014-07-12 22:16 GMT
Find Nodes?
    Voting Booth?

    When choosing user names for websites, I prefer to use:

    Results (241 votes), past polls