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it took about ten years from the time of the first purported publication of a binary search algorithm for a correct algorithm to be published

it's an algorithm where it's easy to have off-by-one errors that lead to nontermination or incorrect results for certain inputs

integer overflow is also a problem on some platforms, especially java



I doubt someone spent 10 years trying to implement a binary search.

I suspect it is as usual, someone made theoretical invention, then someone else looked at it years later and wrote implementation in evening or two


more likely there were a lot of correct implementations, but they got debugged after the initial publication, and then didn't publish the erratum




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