Hello, I have been solving problems in uva online judge and have participated in acm regional contest from my country too. I am new to TIME LIMIT PER CASE style problem solving. What is the actual difference between this and the usual Time Limit we have in in ACM ICPC/ Problem from uva online and other similar sites. As far as I have learned, we assume something around O(x) where x=10^8 to be around 1 sec. Keeping that in mind, we solve problem in uva. So if my solution uses something around 10*7 instructions per test case, and there are 10 test cases maximum, I assume that the code will run within 1 second as 10^7*10=10^8.

How does this work in the Time Limit per case system in sites like sgu/timus. If a problem has time limit per case of 0.5 sec, what should be the complexity, or say roughly number of instructions in my solution? How shall I design my algorithm than?