Please help interpret the Birthday effect as described in Wikipedia:

    A birthday attack works as follows: 

    1) Pick any message m and compute h(m). 
    2) Update list L. Check if h(m) is in the list L. 
    3) if (h(m),m) is already in L, a colliding message pair has been found. 
       else save the pair (h(m),m) in the list L and go back to step 1. 

    From the birthday paradox we know that we can expect to find a matching entry, 
after performing about 2^(n/2) hash evaluations.

Does the above mean 2^(n/2) iterations through the above entire loop (i.e. 2^(n/2) returns to step 1), OR does it mean 2^(n/2) comparisons to individual items already in L.