As I said, what we want to do is, we want to count the number of basic steps it takes to compute a computation as a function of input size.

我刚才提到了，我们要建立，一个根据输入大小的方法来计算,一个计算过程需要的时间,建立这个方法需要几步呢？

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选