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Can someone please explain to me in a simple way why constants don’t matter when it comes to big O notation? Why does the complexity stay the same when you add a constant. This is not a homework question I just want to understand this better. Let me get this straight big O is for seeing the behavior of a function as it approaches infinity right?
I got it. Thanks so much everyone.
It does not matter for complexity theory, which is interested only in how the function scales as the input size grows.
A constant does not affect how the function behaves as input sizes grow towards infinity at all.
However, if you are interested in actually running a certain piece of code, you may very well be interested in a large constant overhead and how the function performs for smaller input sizes.
Difference between complexity theory and practice.