Exam 3: The Efficiency of Algorithms

Q (n) and Q (n²) are ____ in the amount of work they do as n increases.

The converging-pointers algorithm is ____ in the best case.

With sequential search, the bigger the list of items, the more work that must be done to search it.

____ is the algorithmic equivalence of style.

Ease of understanding, elegance, efficiency, and correctness are all characteristics of a good algorithm.

Binary search uses significantly more space than sequential search.

If an Q (n²) algorithm and an Q (n) algorithm exist for the same task, then for large enough n, the Q (n²) algorithm does more work and takes longer to execute, regardless of the constant factors for peripheral work.

Given a sorted list, the sequential search algorithm is more efficient than the binary search.

The ____ case of an algorithm requires the minimum amount of work.

Some algorithms must do work that is not polynomially bounded.

In the sequential search algorithm, the worst case occurs when the value being searched for is the ____ value in the list.

Why would an exponential algorithm be useless with a large input, n?

The process of timing an algorithm using the same machine but searching for different items is called ____.

A collection of sets and vectors is called a graph.

The number of times a number n can be divided by 2 and not go below 1 is called the logarithm of n to the base 3.

Sequential search is an order-n algorithm in the average case.

Anything that varies as a constant times n is said to be of order of magnitude n.

The time an algorithm takes on a particular machine is important for comparing two algorithms that do the same task.

The ____ sort algorithm performs the task of sorting a list by growing a sorted subsection of the list from the back to the front.

An algorithm with order of magnitude Q (n²) grows at the ____ of the rate of the problem size n.