Hacker News Reader

You can't have that because when N=K that's not a valid expression and when N>K you're putting a negative number in the big-O notation. You can't have negative runtime.

All algorithms have a lower-bound on runtime of 1. If a sequence is decreasing and bounded below, it converges to a value [1]. If the sequence is discrete, that means it reaches exactly that limit and never deviates from it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_convergence_theorem

View on HN

It should have been N+K not N-K

I'm not sure what your big-O expression is supposed to mean, but if a sequence is decreasing and bounded below (which runtime is) then it has a limit. Since the sequence is discrete, it can't get arbitrarily close to the limit without reaching it. So at some point the runtime will stop decreasing.

You can approximate the runtime with a function that decreases forever, but the actual runtime will be constant for large enough n.

It is for a typical case not a specific case. The mean time, if you like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com