Chapter 7
Skill: Connection
Needle in a Haystack
I am a part of all that I have met.
—Alfred Tennyson
How hard is it really to find a needle in a haystack?
One way to find out is to sort the hay one piece of straw at a time, examining it for the glint of metal. We may get lucky and find the needle early on in our sorting process, or, just as likely, it may be among the final pieces we examine. Whether we find it first thing, dead last, or somewhere between these two is entirely random. We just can't know which it will be. What we can do, however, is calculate the difference between the shortest and the longest period of time it could take to complete our task. If it requires a half second per piece of straw and there are 5 million pieces in the ...
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