Introduction to Divide and Conquer With Binary Search

Divide and conquer is an algorithmic paradigm in which the problem is repeatedly divided into subproblems until we reach a point where each problem is similar and atomic, i.e., can’t be further divided. At this point, we start solving these atomic problems and combining (merging) the solutions. So, divide and conquer solutions have the following three steps:

1. Divide
2. Conquer
3. Merge

Let’s take an example to grasp this concept better.

Binary search method

Consider a sorted list lst, of n integers. We are required to find if a particular integer value exists in the given list or not.