The issue with searching for something is always directly related to the space in which you are searching. You will certainly have experienced looking for your keys in your house: the search space contains anything from jackets worn the previous day to the sock drawer into which the key might have slipped the last time you did the washing. Upon finding the item (and after a lot of wasted time spent running up and down stairs and searching in various rooms), you then swear to keep things tidier in the future....
We have encountered this issue more often than we are comfortable with admitting, but it illustrates a fundamental issue that we can solve algorithmically without any particular order to build on. In this chapter, we'll explore how to do the following:
- Finding items in an unordered array of chaos
- Making a trade-off between preparation and search
