Why is printing “B” dramatically slower than printing “#”? I generated two matrices of 1000 x 1000: First Matrix: O and #.Second Matrix: O and B. Using the following code, the first matrix took 8.52 seconds to complete: Random r = new Random(); for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < 1000; j++) { if(r.nextInt(4) == 0) { System.out.print("O"); } else { System.out.print("#"); } } System.out.println(""); } With this code, the second matrix took 259.152 seconds to complete: Random r = new Random();

Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array? Here is a piece of C++ code that seems very peculiar. For some strange reason, sorting the data miraculously makes the code almost six times faster. #include <algorithm> #include <ctime> #include <iostream> int main() { // Generate data const unsigned arraySize = 32768; int data[arraySize]; for (unsigned c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c) data[c] = std::rand() % 256; // !!! With this, the next loop runs faster std::sort(data, data