What is the meaning of 'moderately exponential' running time? I was reading some research paper where for hypergraph of bounded rank $k$ they have given moderately exponential algorithm. The runtime of the algorithm is $e^{  \mathcal {O}(k^2\sqrt n) \cdot poly(n)}$. Here $k$ is the rank of the hypergraph, and $poly(n)$ means polynomial in variable $n$.


  What is the meaning of moderately exponential running time ?


I have seen this  link, but did not understand much.
Moderately exponential is not a widely accepted term in general theoretical computer science, though it might have a widely accepted meaning in the area to which the paper you are citing belongs.

From context, it seems that the meaning here is $\exp O(n^\alpha)$ for $\alpha &lt; 1$; an exponential running time would be $\exp O(n)$ or worse.