Surabhi Chaudhary
A Bioinformatician
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Question: Question: What is Big-O Notation ?
Answers
Big O notation just represent the complexity of algorithm or any written script. there are two types of O : one is space complexity that is how much memory or space need to reserve or use while running the script and second one is time complexity that is how much time or steps require by running script.
For e.g. Global alignment of sequence A and B needs a time complexity of O(mn) and a space complexity of O(mn) , where m and n are length of sequence A and B respectively.
I will try to explain it in simple way.
Just think of the Big-O as a way to express the performance of the algorythm. That performance will depend on the number of elements the algorythm is handeling = n.
An example, when you have to make a sum. You need one statement for the first addition, one statement for the second addition, and so on... So the performance will be linear with the number of elements = O(n).
Imagine a sort algorythm, which is very smart, and for each element of handles it automatically shortens the sort for the next element. This will be logarithmic with the number of elements = O(log(n)).
Or a complex formula with parameters, and with each extra parameter, the execution time multiplies. This will be exponential = O(10^n).
Thanks