searching and Big-O

Question 1

a quality solution is:

Answer 1

correct
efficient
elegant
usable

Question 2

correctness

Answer 2

does it solve the problem it’s supposed to solve

Question 3

efficiency

Answer 3

is it as fast as it can be, does it take up the strictly necessary amounts of storage/memory

Question 4

elegance

Answer 4

is it simple yet effective

Question 5

usability

Answer 5

does it provide a satisfactory way for the target audience to use it

Question 6

space-time trade-off

Answer 6

it describes an inverse proportionality between space-complexity and time-complexity

Question 7

time and correctness trade-off

Answer 7

if a programmer is in a rush to write a solution (because of deadlines for example), the solution is more likely to have bugs

Question 8

trade-off between cleverness and comprehensibility

Answer 8

sometimes, the most efficient solution is incredibly counter-intuitive; while efficiency is always welcome, counter-intuitive code can result in misunderstandings from co-developers

Question 9

linear search

Answer 9

a search algorithm that starts from the beginning of a list, and checks each element until the search key is found or the end of the list is reached

Question 10

runtime

Answer 10

the time the algorithm takes to execute

Question 11

binary search

Answer 11

a faster algorithm for searching a list if the list’s elements are sorted and directly accessible

Question 12

Big O notation

Answer 12

a mathematical way of describing how a function (running time of an algorithm) generally behaves in relation to the input size

Question 13

worst-case runtime

Answer 13

the runtime complexity for an input that results in the longest execution