Consequently, every algorithm must have a "number of steps required" and "bytes of memory required" property, right? Close: since they are ever-changing variables, a universal way of describing what other people have achieved is necessary.
Typically, programmers instinctively know how to do that: "is this thing really doing everything twice?!" should be a familiar outcry. What has been said here? Assuming it's a function that has an input parameter x, it sounds like the function is doing something with x twice. Mathematically speaking, this would be expressed as f(x) = 2x.
What this is really saying is that for every input, the required number of steps to fully execute the function is twice the input—isn't this exactly what we have been looking for? What would be a better way to write it down?
