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Why would intuition say that sorting 4MB of data is slow?

Assuming the worst case with 4 billion elements:

log_2(4 billion) = 32

So 128 billion operations or 500GB of memory read and writes if everything is touched only once. Anything below that is peanuts.

You need unimaginably large numbers to make sorting slow. How am I going to find that much data?




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