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>The authors are explicit about the target audience and purpose for the algorithm: undergraduates and textbooks.

Doesn't seem like it. Seems like an algorithm (similar to other approximate cardinality estimation algorithms) with huge applicability.

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From the abstract: "All the current state-of-the-art algorithms are, however, beyond the reach of an undergraduate textbook owing to their reliance on the usage of notions such as pairwise independence and universal hash functions. We present a simple, intuitive, sampling-based space-efficient algorithm whose description and the proof are accessible to undergraduates with the knowledge of basic probability theory."

That just says that this is also simpler and more accessible algorithm, suitable even for undegraduate textbooks.

Not that this is just useful for textbooks, a mere academic toy example, which would be something else entirely.

This is both accessible AND efficient.

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