What is the primary advantage of using binary search over linear search?
Practice Questions
1 question
Q1
What is the primary advantage of using binary search over linear search?
Binary search is easier to implement.
Binary search works on unsorted arrays.
Binary search has a time complexity of O(log n).
Binary search can find all occurrences of an element.
Binary search has a time complexity of O(log n), making it significantly faster than linear search, which has a time complexity of O(n), especially for large datasets.
Questions & Step-by-step Solutions
1 item
Q
Q: What is the primary advantage of using binary search over linear search?
Solution: Binary search has a time complexity of O(log n), making it significantly faster than linear search, which has a time complexity of O(n), especially for large datasets.
Steps: 5
Step 1: Understand what linear search is. Linear search checks each item in a list one by one until it finds the target item or reaches the end of the list.
Step 2: Know the time complexity of linear search. Linear search has a time complexity of O(n), which means if there are n items, it may check all n items in the worst case.
Step 3: Understand what binary search is. Binary search works on sorted lists by repeatedly dividing the list in half to find the target item.
Step 4: Know the time complexity of binary search. Binary search has a time complexity of O(log n), which means it reduces the number of items to check significantly with each step.
Step 5: Compare the two. For large datasets, O(log n) (binary search) is much faster than O(n) (linear search) because it checks far fewer items.
