Why is Binary Search a divide and conquer algorithm?

Question

I was asked if a Binary Search is a divide and conquer algorithm at an exam. My answer was yes, because you divided the problem into smaller subproblems, until you reached y

Answer 1

Binary search is tricky to describe with divide-and-conquer because the conquering step is not explicit. The result of the algorithm is the index of the needle in the haystack, and a pure D&C implementation would return the index of the needle in the smallest haystack (0 in the one-element list) and then recursively add the offsets in the larger haystacks that were divided in the divison step.

Pseudocode to explain:

function binary_search has arguments needle and haystack and returns index
    if haystack has size 1
       return 0
    else 
        divide haystack into upper and lower half
        if needle is smaller than smallest element of upper half
            return 0 + binary_search needle, lower half
        else
            return size of lower half + binary_search needle, upper half

The addition (0 + or size of lower half) is the conquer part. Most people skip it by providing indices into a larger list as arguments, and thus it is often not readily available.