onAlgorithmsAndThePolice

[text] s mitchipedia Nov 30 2023 alecstapp 0 Still laughing about the time a computer scientist who had his bike stolen tried to explain binary search to a cop Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police he was a computer scientist after all. You dont watch the whole thing he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway see if the bike is there and if it is zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasnt there at the halfway mark you rewind to a quarter of the way through. Its very quick. In fact he had pointed out if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didnt go down well. daebelly Dec 26 2023 in sorting