'Jeff Dean':http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ , a famous Google engineer, popularized a list of latency 'numbers everyone should know':http://highscalability.com/numbers-everyone-should-know. The list is a great resource for designing large scale infrastructure systems.

Algorithms and their complexity often occur in critical parts of computer systems, but I find that only few engineers have a good understanding of how a O(n!) algorithm compares to a O(n^5^) one.

Algorithms and their complexity often occur in critical parts of computer systems, but I find that few engineers have a good understanding of how a O(n!) algorithm compares to a O(n^5^) one.

In the coding contest world, competitors think of these tradeoffs all the time. No wonder, there's a set of numbers every algorithm designer should know.

In the coding contest world, competitors think about these tradeoffs all the time. No wonder, there's a set of numbers every algorithm designer should know.

The table below shows the limits that can be reached in a few seconds by algorithms of different complexities, n being the input size. I've added a few algorithms and data structure examples for each complexity class.