Skip to main content

Binary Searching

 

This is the beginning of my new series about algorithms.

Firstly let’s talk about Algorithms in general.

According to Wikipedia Algorithm is a finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions, typically to solve a class of problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are always unambiguous and are used as specifications for performing calculations, data processing, automated reasoning, and other tasks.

Imagine that you are looking for someone with a surname starting with K on the phone book (old-school – I know). Surly you can start from the beginning of the book and looking for “K”, but probably you won’t do it like that. I’m sure you will open the book somewhere in the middle because you know that “K” is somewhere in the middle of the alphabet.

Now imagine that you are logging in to Twitter or any other social platform. When you are doing it you have to put your nickname and password. Twitter must check if you have an account and look into the database for your nickname. Let’s say that your nick is whoAmI. The platform can start looking from “A” but it will make more sense if it will start somewhere in the middle.

That’s the problem of binary searching. With the examples which I provide, we should use the very same algorithm which is binary searching.

Let’s look at how to write this algorithm in Python.

In the two last lines, I’m tasting my algorithm and printing to the console the output. As you can see in line 19 the output is 2. Remember that we are counting from 0. “None” in Python means that there is nothing there.

I hope that the explanation and examples which I put here are clear for you. Leave a comment if you have any questions or visit the Contact section on this page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to build FAQ Chatbot on Dialogflow?

  After Google I/O I’m inspired and excited to try new APIs and learn new stuff from Google. This time I decided to try Dialogflow and build a Flutter Chatbot app that will answer some frequently asked questions about Dialogflow. This time I want to be focused more on Dialogflow rather than Flutter. Firstly, go to  Dialogflow ES console , create a new Agent, specify the agent’s name, choose English as a language and click “Create”. As you created a new agent go to setting and enable beta features and APIs and Save. Now let’s model our Dialogflow agent When you create a new Dialogflow agent, two default intents will be created automatically. The  Default Welcome Intent  is the first flow you get to when you start a conversation with the agent. The  Default Fallback Intent  is the flow you’ll get once the agent can’t understand you or can not match intent with what you just said. Click  Intents > Default Welcome Intent Scroll down to  Responses ....
Post a Comment
Read more

Vertex AI – One AI platform, every ML tool you need

  This year on Google I/O (Google’s Developer conference) Google presented a new platform that unites all ML tools. Vertex AI brings together the Google Cloud services for building ML under one, unified UI and API. There are many benefits to using Vertex AI. You can train models without code, with minimal expertise required, and take advantage of AutoML to build models in less time. Also, Vertex AI’s custom model tooling supports advanced ML coding, with nearly 80% fewer lines of code required to train a model with custom libraries than competitive platforms. Google Vertex AI logo You can use Vertex AI to manage the following stages in the ML workflow: Define and upload a dataset. Train an ML model on your data: Train model Evaluate model accuracy Tune hyperparameters (custom training only) Upload and store your model in Vertex AI. Deploy your trained model and get an endpoint for serving predictions. Send prediction requests to your endpoint. Specify a prediction traffic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flutter 2 is here! What’s new?

  Flutter 2 is finally released. And it has a bunch of new stuff! As my core tech for this year is Flutter and automation (wait for it) I will write about it a lot! Here I want just to start the journey and show you the coolest news in Flutter 2 Web support Flutter’s web support has transitioned from beta to the stable channel. With this initial stable release, Flutter pushes the reusability of code to another level with the support of the web platform. So now when you create a Flutter app that is stable, the web is just another device target for your app. Find more details about this stable release in  Flutter’s web support blog post . Desktop The ReorderableListView now has grab handles for easy drag ’n’ drop with a mouse In this release, It was announced that Flutter’s desktop support is available in the stable channel under an early release flag. What this means is that we’re ready for you to give it a try as a deployment target for your Flutter apps: you can think of it a...
Post a Comment
Read more