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i wish people would comment when they downvote. i made the final comment already knowing (and stating!) that it might rub someone the wrong way but hoping that it might provoke discussion. it's a reasoned and reasonably-informed comment, not just noise-making or an attempt to troll. downvoting without comment in that situation doesn't really further the discussion.

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I imagine you were downvoted for being wrong about binary search (it does require O(1) indexing).

of course, when there are two or three items left, choosing between left and right is the same as choosing an arbitrary index. that's nomenclature. whether you follow the rote textbook definition and do that indexing up front or delay it until you've paired down your possibly-large list into a manageable (whatever that might mean for the problem domain you're dealing with) size, it's still pretty much the same algorithm.

and since you're imagining rather than being certain, that means people continue to downvote without comment, and i continue to cheerily object to that.

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