Question

An application's strings contain duplicate and continuous characters, except for one per string, An application is asked for each of the strings to identify the unique character and say the number of comparisons that are carried out in sequence and how many in binary.

Answer 1

The question concerns identifying a unique character in a string and understanding the number of comparisons made using sequential or binary search algorithms in computer science.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question relates to an application that is required to identify unique characters in a string where all other characters are either duplicates or continuous characters. In computer science, this task involves searching algorithms and character comparison operations. When it comes to the number of comparisons, there are typically two types of search methods: sequential (linear) search and binary search.

In a sequential search, each character in the string is compared one by one until the unique character is found. This can result in as many comparisons as there are characters if the unique character is at the end of the string. On the other hand, a binary search algorithm can be used if the data is sorted, dividing the dataset in half with each comparison, which is more efficient. However, since binary search is not applicable to finding a unique element in the string of characters (as binary search is used for sorted arrays), the context seems to misuse binary search regarding its application to this problem.