alt Hacker News> If you have priors about the data distribution, then it's possible to design algorithms which use that extra information to perform MUCH better.
You don't even need priors. See interpolation search, where knowing the position and value of two elements in a sorted list already allows the search to make an educated guess about where the element it's searching for is by estimating the likely place it would be by interpolating the elements.
Replies
darknoon • yesterday at 6:45 PM
This relies on knowledge of the distribution, just querying in the middle of A = [1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ..., 2^(n-1)] is slower than binary search
> knowing the position and value of two elements in a sorted list
That's a prior about the distribution, if a relatively weak one (in some sense, at least).