Data Structures & Algorithms

Space Time Complexity

Aim of space time complexity theory is to measure or quantify how much time and space a program or an algorithm takes in execution.

• Given a list has n elements,
• Question : How many comparisons are needed in the worst case to find if a number x is in a list
• Solution we would apply to solve this Query: Go one by one and check each element in the list and compare
• In the worst case we would not have that element in the list and we would transverse the complete list
• Hence we would have to perform n comparisons.

n = 4
l = [1,2,3,4]
x = 5
for i in l:
    if i == x:
        print('the element exists')

Time Complexity for above problem is directly proportional to the length of the list

Further Reading :

1. Data Structures and Algorithms - https://jovian.ai/learn/data-structures-and-algorithms-in-python - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkYVOmU3MgA - https://distill.pub/ - https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-structures/?ref=shm - Space & Time Complexity