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> But, the amount of prerequisite knowledge one needs to understand this is very, very little, and would easily fit in a digestible web page I'm really not sur
by sabas123 6y ago
> But, the amount of prerequisite knowledge one needs to understand this is very, very little, and would easily fit in a digestible web page
I'm really not sure on this one.
This is easy if you have an idea of:
1. how you can graph things (runtime vs input size)
2. do the same but stretching the function to infinity
3. compare this to some term (which isn't as tangible compared to most algorithms imo),
And this is only for the intuition part. For people that got into programming by doing some UI stuff, I can definitely can see why _a subset of people_ struggle with this.
- pmiller2 6y agoSure, a subset may struggle. That's beside the point. I'm most interested in giving people who, as I mentioned, have a basic fluency with functions of the real numbers the answer to why you drop constant multiples and everything but the most significant term. If I wanted to make sure everybody understood (which isn't even theoretically possible), I'd have to include the better part of a semester-long course in my explanation, and that defeats the purpose of having everything in a digestible format.