I&#x27;m going to provide an avenue for thinking about why the stick sorting example is problematic.<p>Before starting, you have to specify the the size of the plate &#x2F; the sorting machine. Let&#x27;s say it supports 10,000 sticks.<p>I&#x27;m going to give you 20,000 sticks.<p>Does your machine still solve the problem in O(N)? Nope, it&#x27;s back to O(n log(n)).<p>The issue with complexity theory is that it&#x27;s for _arbitrarily large N_, and solutions that work intuitively for small N often run into walls, especially physical solutions.<p>EDIT:<p>BTW, I had to stop and think for a bit on that one. This question made me smile; it reminded me of why I enjoyed school. Great question, where the answer isn&#x27;t obvious and elucidates something about the nature of complexity and how it disagrees with intuition.