I mean, in the era of VHS this won't work because ultimately you're fast forwarding and rewinding. So you're gonna watch it anyway. but in the digital era I thought this would be what any Police officer did?
Like... they're not even gonna spend 10 minutes on a theft?
Also, if I rewind to the Neolithic and I see a bunch of cavemen, sabertooth tigers and a Schwinn chained to a bike rack, I’m not going to just fast forward from there. I have other questions.
Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all. You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn’t go down well.
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