gen-explain-amortized-analysis-as-you-would-to-a-capable-student-7bbf

Explain amortized analysis as you would to a capable student, in 3-4 sentences.

Amortized analysis is a technique for analyzing the average cost of operations in a sequence, rather than focusing on the worst-case cost of a single operation. The key insight is that while some individual operations might be expensive, if these expensive operations happen rarely enough, the average cost per operation can still be low. For example, in a dynamic array that doubles in size when full, most insertions are cheap (constant time), and even though occasional doublings are expensive (linear time), the cost "averages out" to constant time per insertion. This gives us a more realistic picture of an algorithm's performance over many operations than worst-case analysis alone.