Binary Search Algorithm: Explanation and Python Tutorial 

Hot, i mean binary search is hot 🔥🔥🔥

Do more videos of Data Structures!!

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That's a very good question! Let me try to answer as best as I can. The principle here is just the idea of discarding half the search space each time you search because of some special property you can take advantage of (it just so happens in the guessing game we know if an answer is higher or lower). Now, usually we aren't guessing a computer's random number, but we actually do sometimes have sorted data that we need to work with, and I think you'd be surprised how much searchable data is sorted! Here are some examples: if you've collected someone's tweets for the past year, they would probably be in chronological order. Suppose you want to now figure out if they tweeted on July 4th.. How do you figure out where July 4th is in the data? Without any other knowledge (such as rate of tweeting - what if they tweeted a lot in the first 3 months of the year, or lost their password halfway through the year), we can't really make any assumptions about where in the list this tweet would be if it even exists (so we can't be like "oh it would probably be in the middle of the data"). Then, the most efficient way to search this would be binary search! Some other examples I can think of right now: the English dictionary - we want to find the definition of some word; database IDs - let's say we have a database of users, that is sorted by ID, and we want to find some user with ID xxxx.. actually when you query a database in general, sometimes you have the option of sorting by a specific item, then you may want to perform a search later on with that data; in cs, we also have a data structure called a binary search tree, which is often stored in memory as an array of some sort (no pun intended lol), and this array is typically sorted, this would use binary search to find an item in the tree. You could also argue that these examples might not be totally "realistic". The purpose of binary search is that in the case where you are given access to a sorted array, you can leverage it's sortedness property to efficiently look for an item in the array. The reason why a lot of emphasis is placed on binary search is because it's an easy-ish way to understand how performing a task using different algorithms has an impact on the efficiency of completing the task. In computer science, a lot of emphasis is placed on the most efficient way to do something, and binary search vs linear search is simply a really good introductory example. It serves as a foundation for more complex algorithms and data structures. Hope this can convince you that the triviality of the problem serves a purpose and that binary search is not useless!

@@KylieYYing ​ @Kylie Ying Thanks for this amazing explanation! This type of answers really makes me wanna dive deeper into learning algorithms and cs stuffs. I'll hopefully be a SE freshman soon, and would love to watch other cs stuffs from your channel.

@@KylieYYing wow, some answer, that was! I understand its usefulness, just didnt quite see it with sorted dsta. You have indeed convinced me. Thanks for that explanation... i hope it didnt take longer than your video took - I'd feel so guilty. ❤

To be frank, Python is easy, many people can just read it like English.