> Making those diverge is intentional obfuscation. It's not obfuscation, it's literally the definition. I'm not saying that the algorithm in question is pract

> Making those diverge is intentional obfuscation. It's not obfuscation, it's literally the definition. I'm not saying that the algorithm in question is practical, but asymptotic complexity has a precise mathematical definition, so it's totally possible for an algorithm with "good" time complexity to be so complicated or have such a huge constant that it's impossible to use (see [1] and [2] for some examples). It's also totally legitimate to give a constraint on additional memory size, so that this algorithm is disallowed altogether (which is probably the right answer), or change the problem so that the word size varies with the list length, but it's not legitimate to just say that the algorithm isn't linear time because the constant is too big. [1] http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/powerful-algorithms-too-complex-to-implement http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/4491/powerful-al... [2] https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/galactic-algorithms/ https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/galactic-algorithm...