Binary Search for a Stolen Bike

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 don’t 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 wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s 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 didn’t go down well.

A tweet shares a story about a computer scientist trying to help police find the moment his stolen bike disappeared from CCTV by using binary search. The joke is that the technically correct algorithmic explanation is wildly inappropriate and confusing in a real police investigation, especially when he treats the footage like a sorted dataset. EN: A tweet shares a story about a computer scientist trying to help police find the moment his stolen bike disappeared from CCTV by using binary search. The joke is that the technically correct algorithmic explanation is wildly inappropriate and confusing in a real police investigation, especially when he treats the footage like a sorted dataset.

• @gentoomemes / 7619 2023-11-27