Question

int maxValue = m[0][0];         
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) 
{               
    for (int j = 0; j < N; j++) 
    {                   
        if ( m[i][j] >maxValue )        
        {                   
            maxValue = m[i][j];     
        }                       
    }                   
}                   

cout<<maxValue<<endl;           

int sum = 0;                
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)     
{                   
    for (int j = 0; j < N; j++)     
    {                   
        sum = sum + m[i][j];            
    }                   
} 

cout<< sum <<endl;

For the above mentioned code I got O(n2) as the execution time growth
They way I got it was by:

MAX [O(1) , O(n2), O(1) , O(1) , O(n2), O(1)]

both O(n2) is for for loops. Is this calculation correct?

If I change this code as:

int maxValue = m[0][0]; 
int sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)         
{                       
    for (int j = 0; j < N; j++)         
    {                       
    if ( m[i][j] > maxValue )       
        {                   
        maxValue = m[i][j];     
        }               
        sum += m[i][j];
    }                   
}   

cout<<maxValue<<endl;   
cout<< sum <<endl;   

Still Big O would be O(n2) right?
So does that mean Big O just an indication on how time will grow according to the input data size? and not how algorithm written?

Answer 1

This feels a bit like a homework question to me, but…

Big-Oh is about the algorithm, and specifically how the number of steps performed (or the amount of memory used) by the algorithm grows as the size of the input data grows.

In your case, you are taking N to be the size of the input, and it’s confusing because you have a two-dimensional array, NxN. So really, since your algorithm only makes one or two passes over this data, you could call it O(n), where in this case n is the size of your two-dimensional input.

But to answer the heart of your question, your first code makes two passes over the data, and your second code does the same work in a single pass. However, the idea of Big-Oh is that it should give you the order of growth, which means independent of exactly how fast a particular computer runs. So, it might be that my computer is twice as fast as yours, so I can run your first code in about the same time as you run the second code. So we want to ignore those kinds of differences and say that both algorithms make a fixed number of passes over the data, so for the purposes of “order of growth”, one pass, two passes, three passes, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the same as one pass.

It’s probably easier to think about this without thinking about the NxN input. Just think about a single list of N numbers, and say you want to do something to it, like find the max value, or sort the list. If you have 100 items in your list, you can find the max in 100 steps, and if you have 1000 items, you can do it in 1000 steps. So the order of growth is linear with the size of the input: O(n). On the other hand, if you want to sort it, you might write an algorithm that makes roughly a full pass over the data each time it finds the next item to be inserted, and it has to do that roughly once for each element in the list, so that’s making n passes over your list of length n, so that’s O(n^2). If you have 100 items in your list, that’s roughly 10^4 steps, and if you have 1000 items in your list that’s roughly 10^6 steps. So the idea is that those numbers grow really fast in comparison to the size of your input, so even if I have a much faster computer (e.g., a model 10 years better than yours), I might be able to to beat you in the max problem even with a list 2 or 10 or even 100 or 1000 times as long. But for the sorting problem with a O(n^2) algorithm, I won’t be able to beat you when I try to take on a list that’s 100 or 1000 times as long, even with a computer 10 or 20 years better than yours. That’s the idea of Big-Oh, to factor out those “relatively unimportant” speed differences and be able to see what amount of work, in a more general/theoretical sense, a given algorithm does on a given input size.

Of course, in real life, it may make a huge difference to you that one computer is 100 times faster than another. If you are trying to solve a particular problem with a fixed maximum input size, and your code is running at 1/10 the speed that your boss is demanding, and you get a new computer that runs 10 times faster, your problem is solved without needing to write a better algorithm. But the point is that if you ever wanted to handle larger (much larger) data sets, you couldn’t just wait for a faster computer.