What does “in constant time” imply?

Question

I work as a programmer, but have no computer science background, so recently I\'ve been following along with the excellent MIT OpenCourseWare intro to Computer Science and Progr

Answer 1

"Constant time" has the same meaning as "O(1)", which doesn't mean that an algorithm runs in a fixed amount of time, it just means that it isn't proportional to the length/size/magnitude of the input. i.e., for any input, it can be computed in the same amount of time (even if that amount of time is really long).