One query, against the length of the text it searches

One query, against the length of the text it searches

A pattern of 8 characters looked up in texts from 1,024 to 16,384 characters. The backward search is flat: the same 16 rank queries whatever the text, because it never asks where in the text anything is. The binary search over a suffix array is not, and the gap between them grows. The unit is primitive operations; each structure's own primitive is counted in its own field, and no two of them are the same act. Both axes are logarithmic.

Drawn at 700 × 430, wide on the page. Everything above is what query-cost returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

6 essays call query-cost. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.