Programmer Humor

I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.

Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.

Let's assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search.. Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that's much more complicated than what this post says.

I'm realizing now that this would have been super useful when I worked in Loss Prevention way back when. Wish I had known...

The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.

It would have taken 5 minutes at most

God damn, whoever came up with that is clever. I would have never come up with that on my own.

I'm sure it didn't go well. If it was somehow framed in a sycophantic way where the police were led to believe it was their idea, I'm sure it would have gone better. Wait that might not be too difficult to do.

A police officer being unable to think in such a fashion is exactly why no one could solve the see-saw riddle on Brooklyn 99.