You're doing some stress-testing on various models of glass jars to determine the height from which they can be dropped and still not break. The setup for this experiment, on a particular type of jar, is as follows You have a ladder with n rungs, and you want to find the highest rung from which you can drop a copy of the jar and not have it break. We call this the highest safe rung It might be natural to try binary search: drop a jar from the middle rung, see if it breaks, and then recursively try from rung n/4 or 3n/4 depending on the outcome. But this has the drawback that you could break a lot of jars in finding the answer If your primary goal were to conserve jars, on the other hand, you could try the following strategy. Start by dropping a jar from the first rung, then the second rung, and so forth, climbing one higher each time until the jar breaks. In this way, you only need a single jar-at the moment