Hi and congratulations, this looks like an excellent tool for bioinformatics.
Just out of curiosity, how can you mathematically guarantee constant time searches independent of the database size?
That was an attempt to say (without resorting to Big Oh notation) that the data structures and algorithms we're working on provide O(1) lookups that take a fixed amount of time regardless of the reference / dataset size. Does that make more sense?
I understand what it means, but what I don't understand, and was curious about, is how you can achieve constant-time searching or the dataset. I started with the assumption that you're doing approximate matches, is this correct?
Ah – well to clarify, we're performing exact match lookups on individual k-mers (k-length genetic strings), and then computing a classification result from those exact searches.