And the obvious question I could start with is, and suppose I ask you, how long does the algorithm implemented by this program take to run?

我开始这个话题的第一个问题是，假设我问你，由这个算法实现的程序大概,要运行多久才能给出答案？

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

It is certainly possible, for example, that a quadratic algorithm could run faster than a linear algorithm. It depends on what the input is, it depends on, you know, what the particular cases are. So it is not the case that, on every input, a linear algorithm is always going to be better than a quadratic algorithm.

一个二次平方级复杂度的算法,当然也是可能跑的比线性复杂度算法快的,这取决于，你知道的，输入以及特定的案例，因此并不是对于每个输入,线性复杂度就一定会,比二次平方级复杂度的算法的表现要好,只是通常来说是这样的。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

> So now that might not have felt like the fastest algorithm but think about what you could have done with that algorithm in each iteration, much like the phonebook up front here, you literally split that problem in two because on each iteration roughly half of you were sitting down and then another half and then another half.

虽然这并不是最快的算法,但如果把这种算法每次迭代,就像刚才查电话簿一样，你便将这个问题一分为二了,因为每一次迭代后只有一半坐下来,以此类推。

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