Big-O Notation
This order of growth is the fastest and represents constant time.
What is O(1)?
This algorithm design pattern breaks problems into smaller parts, solves them, and combines them.
What is divide and conquer?
The top node in a tree is called this.
What is the root node?
An ordered sequence that allows adding, removing, and retrieving elements.
What is a list?
This machine is the foundational abstract model of computation.
What is a Turing machine?
This order of growth is slower than O(N) but faster than O(N²).
What is O(log N)?
Algorithms like Prim’s and Kruskal’s use this approach.
What is greedy?
An edge in a graph represents this.
What is a relationship between vertices?
This structure stores unique, unordered elements.
What is a set?
The complexity class for problems solvable in polynomial time.
What is P?
This is the order of growth for bubble sort.
What is O(N²)?
Quicksort is based on this algorithm design paradigm.
What is divide and conquer?
This algorithm finds the shortest path from a start node to all others.
What is Dijkstra’s algorithm?
A key-value data structure.
What is a map (or dictionary)?
Traveling Salesman is an example of this problem class.
What is NP-complete?
This type of analysis measures how much memory an algorithm needs.
What is space complexity?
This method evaluates an algorithm by timing an actual program.
What is experimental analysis?
A binary tree where left and right subtrees have the same number of nodes.
What is a perfectly balanced tree?
This structure stores elements with associated priorities.
What is a priority queue?
This type of algorithm can “guess” solutions and accept one that works.
What is a nondeterministic algorithm?
Of O(N), O(N²), O(log N), and O(2ⁿ), this is the largest.
What is O(2ⁿ)?
This type of algorithm tries all possible solutions to find the best one.
What is brute force?
Prim’s algorithm uses this data structure to pick the smallest connecting edge.
What is a priority queue?
Lists, sets, graphs, and maps are examples of this.
What are abstract data types?
Transforming one problem into another to solve it is called this.
What is reduction?