Chapter 7: Computational Requirements for Algorithms

Algorithms that solve useful problems are at the heart of computer science, but an algorithm must not only be proven to work to be practical. They may take too long to run with our computational resources, or it may require storage of more data than our resources allow. This chapter is dedicated to finding the amount of time and space required to run algorithms; in short, the computational complexity of algorithms when it comes to time and space requirements to run a certain algorithm. We will focus on the complexity of foundational control structures and popular exemplar algorithms of common classes of time and space complexity. Different algorithms will be implemented using Python and the trade-off when it comes to runtime, computational resources, and suchlike will be discussed.

By the end of this chapter, you should have learned about different algorithms, their computational complexities, runtime, and the space required....