This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines:
- Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
- Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
- Talk about your goals for the project.
- Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
- Link to your work if it's linkable.
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.
I'm not saying that knowing this stuff is completely unimportant, but rather than using knowledge of algorithms as a rough signal of someone's ability to do their (non-algorithms-related) job, it's better to measure it more directly.