algorithmlanguage-agnosticlower-bound

Optimality of Binary Search


This may be a silly question, but does anyone know of a proof that binary search is asymptotically optimal? That is, if we are given a sorted list of elements where the only permitted operation on those objects is a comparison, how do you prove that the search can't be done in o(lg n)? (That's little-o of lg n, by the way.) Note that I'm restricting this to elements where the only operation permitted operation is a comparison, since there are well-known algorithms that can beat O(lg n) on expectation if you're allowed to do more complex operations on the data (see, for example, interpolation search).


Solution

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