Average Case Complexity of a function
What is the average case complexity of the following function given that the input is a set of independent uniform natural numbers.
def d(a):
for i in range(len(a)):
if a[i] == 0 or a[i] == 1:
for j in range(i+1, len(a)):
开发者_Go百科 if not (a[j] == 0 or a[j] == 1):
swap(a, i, j)
break
What do you think, how to approach this problem in mathematical terms?
Leaving out all the details, we get two nested loops, indicating a quadratic algorithm. Taking the if
into account, such a small percentage of numbers actually execute the inner loop that the average case is effectively linear.
for i in range(len(a)):
The result will be the length of a
multiplied with the average time for any index in range(len(a))
(let's ignore the break
for now).
if a[i] == 0 or a[i] == 1:
Two accesses of the values of a
, so let's add 2 * [time to retrieve a[i]]
. The probability that a value of a
(an element of an infinite set, ℕ) is an element of any finite set(such as {0,1}) is infinitely close to zero. Since the further code inside takes finite time, we can safely ignore it.
Average case complexity: 2 len(a) [time to retrieve a[i]]
∈ Θ(len(a))
⊂ O(len(a))
.
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