Halve It Again: Binary Search and Its Cousins

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 56m

A release engineer has eleven days of commits, 873 suspects and forty hotel restaurants whose printers just slowed to a crawl. Her colleague says one word: bisect. Part one of The Deep End's algorithms series follows that night to explain why halving is so powerful, why ninety percent of professional programmers in Jon Bentley's classes got binary search wrong, and how a one-line midpoint bug hid in Java's standard library and a celebrated textbook for two decades. Then we meet binary search's cousins: bisection for equations, galloping search, interpolation search, and binary search on the…