Lecture 4 - Loops over Strings, Guess-and-Check, Binary

Question 1

What is exhaustive enumeration?

Question 2

Why would I want to use a boolean flag in when iterating over a for loop?

Answer 2

To check if a certain condition has happened during the execution of the for loop. See example below where I want to know whether the secret number has been found or not during the loop.

secret = 4
secret_found = False

for i in range(1,11):
    if secret == i:
        secret_found = True
        break
if not secret_found:
    print('I did not find the secret')
else:
    print(f'The secret value is {secret}')

Question 3

What is one limitation from using exahustive enumeration to solve a problem computationally?

Answer 3

Exhaustive enumeration only produces a solution if this solution is included in the search space defined.