#day4script

Why can’t I find my stuff?

Narrator:

It’s winter time and I’m getting dressed to go outside. But every time I start putting on layers after layers of clothes, I always can’t seem to find my gloves. Are they in the kitchen? On my bed? On the couch? Oh dear, I seem to have a problem. Why can’t I find my stuff? Is it because I have a lot of stuff that makes it so hard to remember?

  Well, Google stores about 45 billion index pages of information. If each page of information was a sheet of paper and if we stack them all together, we would create a tower of paper 610 times taller than Mount Everest!

  So how can a search engine like Google find your search results so quickly while I find it so difficult to find a pair of gloves? It’s like finding a needle in haystack; so how’s it done?

  Well, it turns out that searching on the Internet is kinda like looking for a person in a hotel room. Here’s James and he is going to hide in his hotel room. But we want to find where is James.

  The simplest way would be to run through every room nearest to you and keep finding. But that would take a long time.

  Is there a better way I can find James? Hmmm.. (rub chin and raise one eyebrow)

  Well, it turns out that there’s a better way known as Binary Search.

  Let’s say the people were arranged in alphabetical order in increasing numbers of the hotel rooms. We could run to the room in the middle and check if the name of the person in the room is James. And then if the person starts with a smaller alphabet than James, we head to the left. If not we head to the rooms to the right. We then head off to the middle room of the newly sectioned area. And we rinse and repeat. Eventually we will find James just like the first method. But we find James at a much much shorter time.

  How much shorter would that be? Well, that depends on number of people staying at the hotel. Let’s say it takes 10 seconds to knock on each hotel door and there’s 500 people, it would take about 80 minutes for the first method and 1.5 minutes for Binary Search. If there were a thousand people in the hotel, it would take 160 minutes for the first method and only 1.6 minutes for Binary Search. Now that’s a whole lot of difference.

  Is finding James such a big deal? Well, yes! Finding James faster means getting your results on Google faster. Because finding James is like searching a keyword term on Google. And that means less waiting time for all of us.

  So how does any of what we just learned help us to find things better at home? Noticed how the people in the hotel were arranged in rooms numbers based on alphabetical order? So the location of each person in a different hotel room depends on the alphabetical relationship of their names. So we don’t need to remember which person is in which room, we just need to remember the alphabetical relationship that all the people have with each other.

  In the same way, simply by placing your home items in locations where they have a natural relationship to makes it easier for us to find them. The TV remote goes near the TV, the shoes go to the shoe rack, the coats go into the cupboard and the the winter gloves goes in the winter jacket.

 *Finds gloves in the jacket

Aha! So that’s where my gloves are!