I thought the time complexity of the following code is O(log N), but the answer says it's O(N)
. I wonder why:
int count = 0;
for (int i = N; i > 0; i /= 2) {
for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) {
count += 1;
}
}
For the inners for-loop, it runs for this many times:
N + N/2 + N/4 ...
it seems to be logN
to me. Please help me understand why here. Thanks
1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8... 1/2 ** n is a geometric sequence with a = 1, r = 1/2 (a is the first term, and r is the common ratio).
Its sum can be calculated using the following formula:
In this case, the limit of the sum is 2, so:
n + n/2 + n/4 ... = n(1 + 1/2 + 1/4...) -> n * 2
Thus the complicity is O(N)