What are the time complexities of finding $8th$ element from beginning and $8th$ element from end in a singly linked list? Let $n$ be the number of nodes in linked list, you may assume that $n > 8$.
The answer is given as $O(1)$ and $O(n)$.
What I learnt till now is that searching operation in linked lists takes linear time since it doesn't have indexes like arrays. Then why does searching the $8th$ element would take constant time?
Further explanation for the answer is as follows :
Finding 8th element from beginning requires 8 nodes to be traversed which takes constant time. Finding 8th from end requires the complete list to be traversed.
Can someone explain me the concept behind this?