# Displaying the Number of Comparisons Made In algorithm design, a comparison is an operation in which two values are checked to determine their relationship, such as whether they are equal, smaller, or greater. Counting the number of comparisons made by an algorithm is useful for analysing its efficiency and understanding how much work the algorithm performs for a given input. The number of comparisons can be displayed by maintaining a counter variable and incrementing it whenever a comparison operation is performed. For example, consider the problem of searching for an element in an array using the linear search technique. In linear search, the required element is compared sequentially with every element of the array until the element is found or the entire array has been examined. The number of comparisons depends on the position of the element being searched. A simple algorithm for linear search with comparison counting is: ```text LinearSearch(A, n, key) count ← 0 for i ← 0 to n - 1 do count ← count + 1 if A[i] = key then print "Element found at position", i print "Number of comparisons =", count return print "Element not found" print "Number of comparisons =", count ``` The corresponding implementation in C is: ```c #include int main() { int n, i, key; int comparisons = 0; int found = 0; printf("Enter the number of elements: "); scanf("%d", &n); int a[n]; printf("Enter the elements:\n"); for (i = 0; i < n; i++) scanf("%d", &a[i]); printf("Enter the element to search: "); scanf("%d", &key); for (i = 0; i