 Alternatively, Φ("S") may be thought of as representing the amount of disorder in state "S" or its distance from an ideal state.Let "o" be any individual operation within a sequence of operations on some data structure, with "S"before denoting the state of the data structure prior to operation "o" and "S"after denoting its state after operation "o" has completed.Once Φ has been chosen, the amortized time for operation "o" is defined to be
where "C" is a non-negative constant of proportionality (in units of time) that must remain fixed throughout the analysis.