"If you say so. Maybe if you try just 'Chinese elements' or 'Japanese elements' or whatever it'll find you a page with something like that?"

"Chinese elements" produces the list of earth, water, fire, wood, and metal. "Chinese elements characters" produce their original depictions. None of which seem to match to Terry's eyes.

"Okay, not elements then, uh... Korean, maybe? Kero did mention it was Chinese, though,maybe we'll need to hit the library after all..."

"Going through every word in a dictionary could work but it's better to find someone who knows chinese."

"Yeah. I mean, maybe the symbols are very obvious to someone who knows even a smattering of it and the fact that we do not know even that much is all that's stopping us."

"If language were an ordered search space, this would be a good chance to explain binary search."

"Come again?"

"If we had a sorted Chinese dictionary. Alphabetic. And knew how to pronounce these characters. Binary search is the fastest way for computers to look for a certain value in an arbitrary list of numbers."

"Well, do you need to have one of those to teach me that? It sounds interesting and I like learning things and you look incredibly attractive when you're teaching me things."

He blushes, stammers a bit, then kisses her again.

Then launches into an explanation of binary search. He writes out a list of numbers from one to sixteen. "So, I want to find the variable in this list labelled '10'. Instead of going 'first thing in the list, is it what I'm looking for? No? Second thing in the list...' All the way through, we say 'how long is the list, divide that by two, start there.'" He circles 8. "Is what I'm looking for greater than 8? Then now we take a smaller list, the top half, and search through that." He circles twelve. "Ten is less than twelve, so the next sub-list is from eight to twelve, and oh, halfway between that is what we're looking for, ten. We found it in six steps instead of ten. The beauty of this is that you divide the list by half each time, so doubling the size of the list only makes it take slightly longer."

"Ooh, so it grows logarithmically with the size of the input, that's clever."

"Logarithmic growth of processing time is the holy grail of algorithm design. The best sorting algorithms are all O of N-log-N. Which means they take N times the logarithm of N time to do where N is the size of the list being sorted."

"'O'?"

"Some mathematical operator, not sure what it actually stands for but..." He writes O(n). "It means 'in the worst case the growth of processing time is this' as far as I can tell."

"So if you get an unsorted list and you want to find an item in it you'd sort it and then do binary search and it'd take O of N log N plus log N?"

"It'd still count as O of N log N in that case... It's for dealing with really really big numbers. Adding two things of the same 'size' or multiplying them by anything other than another N doesn't affect their 'O' valuing. It'd be faster to just do a piece by piece search if you only expected to need to find one thing in that list ever, that's O of N instead of O of N log N. But usually you're not going to look for one thing and throw the list away, so it's faster to sort it and then do whatever you wanted to do to the sorted version."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense."

"Computer science: A lot of smart people have been working very hard for a long time on it!"

She giggles. "I wonder if magic's the same."

"It's harder to find online tutorials, at any rate. Back to the diagram, these symbols are like clock numbers, and they seem even less Chinese than the other ones. Any ideas?"

"Well... I dunno, nothing concrete, just, 'this magic system seems to rely a lot on symbology.' The symbol is very mystical-looking, in a way that I wouldn't naively expect real-world magic to look, if you know what I mean?"

"...Long shot, but what if we try to meditate on the symbols? We can ask Windy if she knows anything in a minute."

"Oh, that's not a bad idea. I don't have an easy time meditating, though."

"Kero says the staff helps me work with cards and meditate but will make me slower at anything else. You can poke the IDE - developer environment - I just installed, read the tutorials, while I meditate for a little bit?"

"Sure. Have fun?" she half-asks, unsure about how much fun this kind of thing is to him, then starts poking around the IDE.