Comment on What are you working on? December 2011

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:37:12 GMT

Yes, but at some point, the knowledge becomes so basic that it should be considered part of basic CS literacy. By analogy, if you are a writer, you should know what similes are even if you aren't using them every day (to say nothing of things like commas).

I personally consider binary search to be in this class of knowledge. It's one of the simplest (if not the simplest) divide-and-conquer algorithms, and if a person doesn't know whether it performs better than linear search and why, that tells me that the person lacks all kinds of other pieces of critical knowledge, as well.

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