2.1 Computational Tractability

Efficiency of algorithms is defined in the terms of the running time and the algorithms must be efficient in their use of other resources as well, especially the amount of space(or memory) they use. To analyze algorithms, we focus on the worst case running time where we look for a bound on the largest possible running time the algorithm could have over all inputs of a given size N, and see how it scales with N. The worst-case analysis is the best used when analyzing algorithms.