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That bias with a fixed L is present, but you already mentioned the answer in your article: the difference is bounded.

Compare to the situation with algorithm complexity. We usually don't attempt to talk about the running time of merge sort by fixing a reference machine on which to do an instruction count. We instead introduce Big-Oh and agree to ignore the differences in constants.



> We usually don't attempt to talk about the running time of merge sort by fixing a reference machine on which to do an instruction count.

Unless you're Knuth!


The difference is not really bounded in a meaningful way. The bound is large enough that the complexity can go to zero in some language.




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