In Lecture 3, 6.00SC-Introduction to cs and programming, at around 40:00, while calculating the square root of 12345 in bisection search, professor Guttag says the search space is 12345/0.01^2 and not 12345/0.01.I couldn't understand why we use 0.01 ^2 instead of just 0.01 .Could anyone help me ?

Question

In Lecture 3, 6.00SC-Introduction to cs and programming, at around 40:00, while calculating the  square root of 12345 in bisection search, professor Guttag says the search space is 12345/0.01^2 and not 12345/0.01.I couldn't understand why we use 0.01 ^2 instead of just 0.01 .Could anyone help me ?

anonymous · Answer

I believe the formula for the efficiency of binary search is log2(N) where N is the size of the sample set. The smallest step between possible guesses is going to be the epsilon to power of the divisor, which in this case will be 2 at every step.