> that complexity is meant to be computationally ridiculous, and probably scales with length. I'd think that there is an initial hashing (which is quite fast),

> that complexity is meant to be computationally ridiculous, and probably scales with length. I'd think that there is an initial hashing (which is quite fast), and then iterated computations on that fixed length, with a more or less predictable (and high) CPU and memory intensity - in other words, not (significantly) scaling with length.