If a problem solution involves many accesses to the interior values of a list, then an arraybased list may be a more time-efficient way to store and process that list. In a linked list, all values except the first must be accessed sequentially; that is, to access a specific node, we must access all those that precede it, beginning with the first node in the list. An average of nl2 accesses are thus required to access a node in a linked list of length n. By contrast, all values of an array-based list can be accessed directly, permitting such lists to be processed more quickly.