How does Divide and Conquer Work?
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Take a small twig, smaller than the width of your finger., and snap it in two. Pretty easy, you’d imagine. Now take five of them together and snap them. Still possible, but it probably requires a little more effort. Now take fifty twigs, each only a tiny sliver, and try to snap them all at once. It would be really hard, if you could manage it at all. Divide them up into smaller groups or individually and you can conquer that task with ease.
The basic notion is that if you have a problem, a good strategy is normally to divide that problem in small chunks that can be independently dealt with rather than having to solve the entire problem at once.
This also translates into military strategy. If you have a set of potential adversaries, it’s normally better to engage only one of them and defeat them entirely before moving onto the next. That way, your adversaries cannot support one another while they are individually being engaged.
Likewise, a common strategy for dealing with unitary enemies is to first divide them into multiple enemies. In American politics, it’s often been observed that a mechanism for eliminating the political power of poor people is to turn blacks and whites against one another – as long as you can convince people experiencing the same economic conditions to fear/distrust one another based on superficial characteristics, you can marginalize the political power of the combined class.
In Computer Science, ‘divide and conquer’ is used to describe virtually all simple algorithms. For example, if you want to put a list in a certain order, you will almost always do so by first putting a sub-section of that list in that order and only then using those ordered sub-lists to help order the overall list.
Double edged statement, 1) divide your opponents resources and weaken them for defeat or 2) divide your own assets and get more done simultaneously
If you split your enemy’s forces into smaller, separated segments, you can isolate those segments and dispatch them more quickly
Split up to cover more ground. You divide your resources to get multiple things done at the same time.
I’ve always thought of this in terms of millitary tactics. So if that’s not the context you’re looking for, sorry. But I think this can be applied to other situations too. The way it works is If you’re outnumbered, you can trick your opponent into dividing his army into sections that are individually smaller than your own. Then you can engage these weaker units one by one instead of fighting a single battle against the entire concentrated force you’d probably lose.
For example, if you had a hundred soldiers, and you were facing 150, you send just a few of yours to cause a distraction, force them to split into groups of 50. All of a sudden, you now have a 2:1 advantage. Wipe them out, repeat. You just accomplished with a smaller force what couldn’t be done in a pitched battle, by simply forcing the enemy to split his forces instead of concentrating them
This works by turning a big problem into a set of smaller problems. For example, when you plan a party you break it down into small things like food, invitations, entertainment, etc. Dealing with each one at a time is easier than juggling every thing simultaneously
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