Overview

Another year has commenced, I am now in year 12 and is starting to learn about some other things now. The main thing that I have tried to understand is Big O, it seemed simple at the start, but got confusing really quick. I also had to learn about some other mathematical concepts like logs (the lecture was using it as an example, but I couldn’t understand it). Overall, learning about this is a multi-week adventure, so get used to seeing posts about it.

What was learnt

As mentioned above, I have tried to learn about the concept of Big O. We had to watch a series of videos which tried to explain different aspects of Big O. I only really got through one, this was about “orders of growth” and was trying to show how different methods have a longer/shorter running times depending on the formula used. The table below shows the running times of 4 popular ways, and how many times it will take to go through every entry.

N (going through every item)

This goes through every item and prints it, and is why the amount of n is equal to running time:

arr = [1, 2, 3,...]
for i in arr:
 print(i)

N^2 (double the time)

This goes through every item and prints it and does that again, and is why the amount of n*n is equal to running time:

arr = [1, 2, 3,...]
for i in arr:
 print(i)
for i in arr:
 print(i)

2^N (double the time)

This goes through every element twice (double for loop) and is slow.

arr = [1, 2, 3,...]
for a in arr:
 for b in arr:
  print(a+b)

Log(n)

I am still confused by how this works and will try to understand logs better.

Reflection

Did you put your best effort forward?

While I could say that I did a lot of effort trying to understand Big O and how it shows the number of iterations something has to do. I should say that it was more of a weekend thing, I spend the week just trying to do minimal amount of work, but at the weekend I realised that I have to write this (the blog post) and there has to be something in it. This upcoming week I will try to use more in class time to continue to watch the remaining videos and read the content.

How did you try to understand even when confused?

It is not that surprising that I got confused on sections of this task, but the ways that I have tried to fill in the gaps are important. Firstly, I went to look at some other opinions, these were Google results and YouTube videos, they helped significantly but there were some things that still didn’t make sense. An example of this was logs, while I still don’t fully understand them, I have a way better knowledge than before. To do this, I asked my sibling that has done this before and understands math. At the same time Big O was explained and most of my questions were answered.

What have you learnt about yourself from this task?

From this task, I learnt that I should try and take the time to understand something more deeply, rather than trying to rush through it and not understand a concept. With Big O, I had to take a lot of time to understand the concept and the formula, but in the end it was worth it, and I am able to now try and look at the next topic related to Big O. Additionally, I learnt that I should ask people more questions when I am stuck and even try to use the internet to my advantage by looking at opinions and watching videos on the subject.