Comment on Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

• CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Your reasons for why they were incorrect about a binary search being useless in situations that don’t leave visual cues is that you can simply look for the visual cues lmao, that’s not valid at all

  I never said they work 100% of the time. I said they work most of the time, which is a true statement.

  An event happens in time, that event has a duration, if you can detect that duration then a binary search works perfectly fine.

  And even after the duration most times events change the environment around them, which stay statically changed, and are detectable.

  So much work to try to Kill the Messenger. Maybe organizations don’t want people to think they work so people won’t demand that they be used, causing more work for them.

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  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    An event happens in time, that event has a duration, if you can detect that duration then a binary search works perfectly fine.

    And even after the duration most times events change the environment around them, which stay statically changed, and are detectable.

    Right. And when that happens, it’s covered by the second paragraph of the parent comment:

    If there is a long-lasting visual cue that the event has or has not happened yet (e.g. a window is either broken or not), then a binary search is very useful.

    Situations where binary searches aren’t useful are covered in the third paragraph of the comment:

    If the event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue (e.g. an assault), then binary search is practically useless.

    You’ve claimed that you disagree with this, but have yet to explain why you disagree beyond saying that there would be visual cues. Except that they’ve already said that binary searches work in situations that leave visual cues. You haven’t explained how a binary search can work in situations that leave no visual cues except by claiming they they would, EXCEPT IF THEY DO, THEN THE PERSON YOU CLAIM TO DISAGREE WITH HAS ALREADY SAID THAT BINARY SEARCHES ARE USEFUL.

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    • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You’ve claimed that you disagree with this, but have yet to explain why you disagree beyond saying that there would be visual cues.

      I have explained it, multiple times. I disagree that there would not be visual clues most of the time. I can’t prove a negative I don’t belleve in, to me its a false scenario that doesn’t (mostly) happen. In fact, the whole point of my very first comment was to rebut implicitly the ‘no visual clues’ clause.

      Each comment is not atomic, on its own, its part of an overall conversation being had. To try and do so otherwise is just to play “gotcha” and is intellectually dishonest.

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      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        They never said “most of the time.” They only brought up two categories of events: those that leave lasting visual cues, and those that don’t.

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