CISC 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Jigsaw Puzzle, Linear Search, Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Computing
• Course: CISC 121
• Professor: Wendy L Powley

Document Summary

Sometimes too often the only way to find a certain item in a collection of items is to pick though them. Highly detailed puzzles often reduce this process to simply trying a lot of pieces in various orientations until one finally fits (or is finally discovered to be missing!! As previously mentioned, computers generally don"t have the ability to scan a large, randomized collection of items at once in order to spot one that fits a specific description or set of criteria. The end of the collection is reached without a match. The above type of search is called a linear search. A linear search looks at the elements of a collection in whatever sequence they are presented. For numbered collections such as python 3"s lists, this sequence is determined by the index value associated with each element. Due to the above, linear searches are also known as sequential searches.