Yeah, pigs don't like to be corrected. Or made to look like they don't know what they're doing.
I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I'm assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there's no partially existing bike.
each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting
hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour
edit: to use the entire hour we'd need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps
I regularly bisect commits in the range of 200k (on the low end) for finding causes of bugs. It takes me minutes. Pretty crazy
History is about 10k years, the 200k years is mostly pre-history. People didn't write stuff down until they invented agriculture and needed to track trade between owners, workers, etc
True and interesting to note. OOP says 'dawn of humanity' though, not recorded history, so taking 200k as 'human history' is also valid.
Yeah, I'm used to the narrower meaning of "history", meaning recorded. I like that definition as it lets you differentiate between it and prehistory.
Well, in this case it must have been recorded on video, so could as well start recording before inventing the writing
I'm a little surprised the police didn't already know about that method. Seems like they'd encounter enough CCTV footage that'd it'd be standard training.
I once again overestimate the training levels of the police.
Their method actually does make sense, you just have to remember they aren't cops to solve (boring) crimes like petty theft. Why get it done as efficiently as possible when you can milk it for hours of overtime? 12 hours of footage means 6+ hours of overtime even watching it at x2 speed, and it's the kind of thing you can basically have going on in the background. Cops being willfully ignorant for their own benefit makes sense to me
You know what's even better than milking it for 6hrs of OT? Saying its "to hard" to the victim, going home and then lying about doing 6hrs of OT and getting paid anyway.
Cops lie about OT systemically. Its absolutely rampant. The only consequence they ever get is either a few hrs suspension without pay or fired, and most states are happy to hire them next door immediately so they can do it again.
just tell them there is a black man at the moment of theft, they will get on it lickety split!
- Binary search: O(log(n))
- Sequential search: O(n)
- Linear search: O(n)
- Police ethnicity database search: O(0)
I'm sure it didn't go well. If it was somehow framed in a sycophantic way where the police were led to believe it was their idea, I'm sure it would have gone better. Wait that might not be too difficult to do.
You just have to say there was a weird technique the Nazi's liked to use.
Na. If it's British police it's just an excuse. All they're there for after all these years of Tory cuts is to give you a reference number so you can make an insurance claim.
more importantly cops don't actually give a shit about solving crime.
In England the police primarily exist to keep noise down in middle class areas. I assume it's even worse in America
That is their primary purpose here too but it just requires more violence and subjection, Americans are extra noisy.
The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
My Graphics card/ssd wouldn't be able to handle the skipping of such big files
I used to do this when having problems while rendering video in my past life.
image transcription:
Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all. You don't watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn't there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It's very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn't go down well.
Pfft, didn't even try to enhance the footage. They're obviously not cut out for forensics work.
