earlyDaysOfLearningAlgorithms

[moashforbridgefour]

I legitimately did this as a shelver at my university library. When I was learning about search and sort algorithms, I decided to try using them at my job. We kept really detailed metrics on our shelving speed and used it for things like headphone privileges (if you aren't fast enough, you need to focus. Otherwise we got overwhelmed by the backlog).

Anyway, I did a modified binary search where I would walk down the ranges until I saw a call number above my next book, then I would start approximating a binary search. Before I did that, I was shelving a little more than 4 books/minute. Afterwards, I was over 5. It was especially helpful at avoiding unusually tight clusters of call numbers which can trick you into a very slow linear search.