What happens if a binary search on a non-sorted data set is attempted? [closed]

Question

What happens if a binary search on a non-sorted data set is attempted?

Answer 1

The results are unpredicable. If the data set has the target, it may or may not be found.

EDIT Just for kicks, I ran a little experiment. First, I picked an array size and generated an int array {0, 1, ..., size-1}. Then I shuffled the array, did a binary search for each value 0, 1, ..., size-1 and counted how many of these were found. For each size, I repeated the shuffle/search-for-each-value steps 100,000 times and recorded the percent of searches that succeeded. (This would be 100% for a sorted array.) The results are (rounded to the nearest percent):

Size    % Hit
 10      34%
 20      22%
 30      16%
 40      13%
 50      11%
 60      10%
 70       9%
 80       8%
 90       7%
100       6%

So the larger the array, the worse the effects of not sorting. Even for relatively small arrays, the results are pretty drastic.