Exploring Big O Notation in Polyglot Notebooks

Using the time magic command to explore algorithmic performance

Polyglot Notebooks is a great way of running interactive code experiments mixed together with rich markdown documentation.

In this short article I want to introduce you to the #!time magic command and show you how you can easily measure the execution time of a block of code.

This can be helpful for understanding the rough performance characteristics of a block of code inside of your Polyglot Notebook.

In fact, we’ll use this to explore the programming concepts behind Big O notation and how code performance changes based on the number of items.

This article builds upon basic knowledge of Polyglot Notebooks so if you are not yet familiar with that, I highly recommend you read my Introducing Polyglot Notebooks article first.

Recording Execution Time

Let’s start off here showing how the #!time magic command can be used to measure the execution time of a cell.