Talk:Bitap algorithm

Someone wrote 'it performs best on patterns less than a constant length'. Such statements should not be made without adequite analysis. It is true that patterns that are 33 characters long may take twice as long as patterns of length 32, but if the algorithm beats the hell out of all its competitors, or it takes 2 nanoseconds instead of 1, then there's no reason not to use it.

Then the paragraph says the complexity in this case is O(m+n). But if m is limited to 32, then O(m+n) is the same as O(n) because O(constant) is 0.

Perhaps we should say that for arbitrary m and n, the algorithm has complexity O(kmn). Now this may look inefficient, but if you consider that modern processors can perform in the region of 64 billion of these operations every second, you'll understand why the algorithm is so fast.