How does Divide and Conquer Work?
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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.
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