15.3 Binary Search

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Binary Search Introduction

Binary search is a nice way of searching a list for a particular item. It requires the list to be in sorted order and uses that fact to find an element quickly.

To do a binary search, we start in the middle of the list, and check if that's our desired element. If not, we ask: is this element bigger or smaller than our element?

If it's bigger, then we know we only have to look at the half of the list with smaller elements. If it's too small, then we only look at the half with bigger elements. In this way, we can cut in half the number of options we have left at each step, until we find our target element.

What's the worst possible case? When the element we want isn't in the list at all. Then we will make comparisons until we've eliminated all regions of the list, and there are no more bigger or smaller halves left.

For an animation of binary search, see these slides.

What's the intuitive runtime of binary search? Take a minute and use the tools you know to consider this.

It's important to note, however that each step doesn't cut it exactly in half. If the array is of even length, and there is no 'middle', we have to take either a smaller or a larger portion. But this is a good intuitive approach.

We'll do a precise way next.

To precisely calculate the runtime of binary search, we'll count the number of operations, just as we've done previously.

First, we define our cost model: let's use the number of recursive binary search calls. Since the number of operations inside each call is constant, the number of calls will be the only thing varying based on the size of the input, so it's a good cost model.

Alright, here's the result:

A couple properties worth knowing (see below for proofs):

Solution:

We start with the following inequality:

Exercise:

One cool fact to wrap up with: Log time is super good! It's almost as fast as constant time, and way better than linear time. This is why we like binary search, rather than stepping one by one through our list and looking for the right thing.

To show this concretely:

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