Re:Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
by a57721 on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @06:01PM
(#41439761)
I recall a story about a private mailing list with ~1000 participants, where someone was leaking all the messages to the public. To quickly catch the responsible subscriber, the admin used binary search and selectively altered the messages by inserting an extra blank character somewhere.
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Re:Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
by meindnoch on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:17AM
(#41444763)
This is where binary search is not necessary. The admin could have just sent out unique messages, by making binary variations at 10 locations in the email (or ternary variations at 7 locations, or quaternary variations at 5 locations, etc.). E.g. choose 10 words, that can be replaced with a synonym, then generate 2^10 = 1024 unique messages to identify the leaker.