Is it possible to do a binary search on an unordered list, and if so, what would the code look like? Thank you very much for the help.
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Answer
Read this Binary Search.
In the second line it says
“…is a search algorithm that finds the position of a target value within a sorted array.”
If we have the following list: lst = [1, 3, 4, 6, 2, 9, 8, 5, 7], and we want to find where 6 is.
We would look at the element in the middle of the list. In this case 2, the algorithm checks to see if 2 < 6 and that is in fact true. The algorithm would now search for 6 in the right sub-list, i.e. [9, 8, 5, 7] because it assumes a sorted list and it will not be able to find our target 6.
So in short, you can not do binary search on an unordered list.