Binary Search Bike Theft Joke

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.

Вверху рассказывается о компьютерном учёном, который пытался объяснить полицейскому бинарный поиск, чтобы найти момент кражи велосипеда на записи с камер. Шутка в том, что алгоритм поиска по отсортированным данным нелепо применяется к видеозаписи: зритель перематывает к середине, а затем сужает поиск вдвое. Такая чрезмерно техническая оптимизация не впечатляет полицейских и создаёт абсурдную ситуацию.

• @right_wing_dev_squads / 12357 2025-06-20