Re:Möbius Printing Helper
by vincnetas on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @08:22AM
(#26327930)
This only works if you read all pages one by one. But if you have 100+ pages document and want to jumt to page 63 you gona have a bad time.
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I am not so sure. With normal order, if I want to get to page 63 out of 100 pages, I will randomly pick the middle and scan linearly until I hit 63.
With this one, I know the last page is around 50 in the normal order. So I will just invert the stack and scan linearly for 63 from the bottom.
Also is you want to jump to page 63 its not enough to find the place to jump to, you also need to flip each page individually and put in back of the stack to have proper ordering. You cant just take stack of 62 pages and put in to the bottom.
And if you don't know exactly how many pages there are? Normaly you would just do binary search.
If pages are numbered, the largest page number is still on last page. Just look there.
Or alternatively: The first step of your binary search is to look at the page number on the flip side of page 1 and determine to flip the stack or not.
Why? You can just binary search. It'll take about 5 page turns. It's not like you can go to 77th page in one go, you need to "sort of" binary search in normal order as well since you don't know exactly where page 77 is. You just now it's somewhere around 3/4 of the way.