>The real world also doesn’t allow you random access, you are limited by the speed of light and have to go from one location to the next. "Random access" doesn

>The real world also doesn’t allow you random access, you are limited by the speed of light and have to go from one location to the next. "Random access" doesn't mean that accessing an item always takes the same time regardless of the size of the collection, it means that, if the size of the collection doesn't change, access times are uniform independently of which particular item is accessed. For example, one might conceive of a storage device shaped like a sphere the size of the solar system, where an item is read by shining a laser onto the surface of the sphere and measuring how the laser is scattered on its way back. Such a device would be random access, even though it's impossible to grow the collection, and even though a collection with twice the radius and four times the storage size would have four times the latency.