Asymptotic Algorithm Analysis

Asymptotic Algorithm Analysis of an algorithm determines the running time in Big-O notation, to perform analysis:

• we find the worst-case number of primitive operations executed as a function of the input size
• we don’t need this function exactly, we just want to express it using Big-O

If we determine that the algorithm arrayMax executes at most $8n-2$ primitive operations then we say that the algorithm arrayMax “runs in $O(n)$ time”. Since constant factors and lower-order terms are eventually dropped, we can disregard them when counting primitive operations.