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Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police
(startrek.website)
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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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But you will see the event happen though.
It's a matter of if you can identify who the perpetrator is or not, but at least that due diligence should be done by police, looking at the person doing the crime and see if they can be identified.
Not with a binary search.
Edit: just collapse this thread and move on. Cosmic Cleric is an obvious troll.
Yes you will.
A binary search is just what it says, it's just for searching only.
When you find that moment in time where the bike was there one moment, and then the next moment the bike's not there, then you view at regular or even slow-mo at those few seconds of the bike in the middle of disappearing, and see the perpetrator, and hopefully can identify them.
Binary search only works on sorted data, i.e. you know which side of the mid point is pointing towards the incident. If the incident leaves no trail, you can't know whether you can discard the left side or the right side, making it a complicated linear search at that moment.
There's a moment where the bike is there, then another when its not. The whole video, either way, will either from the beginning up to the point of theft have the bike there, or NOT have the bike there from the point of theft to the end of the video. The marker is the removal of the bike from the video lens.
But the comment you replied to wasn't talking about bike thefts specifically, it was talking about unspecified situations that don't leave traces. You responded to someone saying that binary search doesn't work in situations that don't leave cues not by arguing against the premise (e.g. "but no such event exists, everything leaves cues"), but by telling them that you simply have to look for the cues from the hypothetical event that didn't leave any.
And my point is that the DID leave a clue that a binary search would pick up on, the disappearance of the bike.
But it didn't, because if it did then it would fall under the second paragraph of their comment, where they said that binary search would be useful. The comment isn't just talking about bike thefts.
The OP is, as well as binary searches. Both are being discussed.
The OP is, but the comment you replied to isn't. They expanded on the original post, and said that while binary search is useful in that situation (along with many others), it would be useless in other situations.