bisection
termops cultureprogramming
Halving a search space repeatedly until one candidate remains, so that a thousand possibilities take ten tests rather than a thousand.
It is arithmetic rather than opinion: each test that eliminates half the remaining candidates costs one step and buys a doubling. The prerequisite is a reliable test - something that answers yes or no the same way every time - and where the fault is intermittent, bisection stalls until that test exists.
Also known as: binary search debugging, halving