some simple algorithms and data structures this contains few examples intended to give you some intuition about algorithm design many other algorithms appear elsewhere in the book keep in mind that the most efficient algorithm is not always the algorithm of choice program that does everything in the most efficient possible way is often needlessly difficult to understand it is often good strategy to start by solving the problem at hand in the most straightforward manner possibleinstrument it to find any computational bottlenecksand then look for ways to improve the computational complexity of those parts of the program contributing to the bottlenecks search algorithms search algorithm is method for finding an item or group of items with specific properties within collection of items we refer to the collection of items as search space the search space might be something concretesuch as set of electronic medical recordsor something abstractsuch as the set of all integers large number of problems that occur in practice can be formulated as search problems many of the algorithms presented earlier in this book can be viewed as search algorithms in we formulated finding an approximation to the roots of polynomial as search problemand looked at three algorithms--exhaustive enumerationbisection searchand newton-raphson--for searching the space of possible answers in this sectionwe will examine two algorithms for searching list each meets the specification def search(le)"""assumes is list returns true if is in and false otherwise""the astute reader might wonder if this is not semantically equivalent to the python expression in the answer is yesit is and if one is unconcerned about the efficiency of discovering whether is in lone should simply write that expression linear search and using indirection to access elements python uses the following algorithm to determine if an element is in listdef search(le)for in range(len( ))if [ =ereturn true return false if the element is not in the list the algorithm will perform (len( )testsi the complexity is at best linear in the length of why "at bestlinearit will be linear only if each operation inside the loop can be done in constant time that raises the question of whether python retrieves the ith element of list in constant time since our model of computation assumes that fetching the