I need to find a number of objects from a large container.
The only way I can think of to do that seems to be to just search the container for one item at a time in a loop, however, even which an efficient search with an average case of say “log n” (where n is the size of the container), this gives me “m log n” (where m is the number of items I’m looking for) for the entire operation.
That seems highly suboptimal to me, and as its something that I am likely to need to do on a frequent bases, something I’d definitely like to improve if possible.
Neither part has been implemented yet, so I’m open for suggestions on the format of the main container, the “list” of items I’m looking for, etc, as well as the actual search algorithm.
The items are complex objects, however the search key is just a simple integer.
Hash tables have basically O(1) lookup. This gives you O(m) to lookup m items; obviously you can’t lookup m items faster than O(m) because you need to get the result out.