Binary Search Revisited: Another Advantage of Fibonacci Search

Binary search method is a well-known and a fundamental technique to search a key out of an ordered table. Fibonacci serh is kind of binary search adopting nonequal splitting criterion for dividing the remaining part of the table. This paper clarifies another advantage of Fibonacci search, which has not been found so far. First, it is shown that, from the viewpoint of the amount of head movement, Fibonacci search gives more than 10 percent better efficiency than the ordinary binary search. Furthermore, we propose a novel variation of Fibonacci search, and show that it attains nearly 20 percent better efficiency in average than the ordinary binary search.