For
the gradient is . The steepest descent method with exact line search for a positive-definite quadratic therefore uses
For and , the minimizer is . Put
Starting from , direct substitution gives and, inductively,
The Euclidean norm is unchanged by the alternating sign, so
For a positive-definite matrix, the spectral condition number of a positive-definite matrix is
Here , and hence
The conjugate gradient method starts with and updates
By finite termination of the conjugate gradient method, it reaches the exact solution in at most the number of distinct eigenvalues. This matrix has two, so at most
are required in exact arithmetic.
Under the permitted singular value bounds, gives
For the symmetric positive-definite matrix in part (iii), its eigenvalues are the squared singular values of , so
Apply the supplied conjugate gradient convergence bound to . For and nonzero , the function increases with , giving
Thus the error in this weighted norm contracts at a guaranteed exponential factor of at most per iteration, up to the prefactor . Here . The Pythagorean identity in part (iii) also identifies with the excess squared linear least-squares problem objective, which consequently decreases by a bound proportional to . For the Euclidean norm, the same eigenvalue bounds give .
For relative accuracy in the -weighted norm, it is sufficient to take
Compute once in operations. Each iteration applies with two dense matrix multiplications and uses further arithmetic operations; when this costs . Hence the total cost is
Using finite termination of the conjugate gradient method in exact arithmetic refines this to . Explicitly constructing first would add setup work and is unnecessary. These accuracy estimates concern relative error; an absolute tolerance replaces by when . If , the initial guess already solves the problem.
As in part 2(b)(v), the Gaussian assumption alone does not make the printed singular value interval a certainty. For example, the event that every entry of has absolute value below a sufficiently small positive number has positive probability and forces , contradicting the asserted lower endpoint. The displayed rate is therefore conditional on the singular-value bounds authorized by the paper. The cost and convergence derivation are exact under that condition; an unconditional probabilistic statement would need an additional failure-probability estimate.