Note that increasing the base increases the time needed to pick formula_6 by a factor of formula_52, but decreases the number of digits needed to achieve a given precision by the same factor, and since the algorithm is cubic time in the number of digits, increasing the base gives an overall speedup of formula_85. When the base is larger than the radicand, the algorithm degenerates to binary search, so it follows that this algorithm is not useful for computing roots with a computer, as it is always outperformed by much simpler binary search, and has the same memory complexity.