Understanding the problem

Even after learning about binary search, there are situations where simply finding a target value is not enough. Sometimes, we need to locate a specific position, for example, the first occurrence of a value in a sorted list, which binary search alone does not directly provide. To see why this can be a problem, let’s look at an example.

Example

Imagine you are a school teacher with a sorted list of thousands of students. Several students scored 85 marks, and you want to identify the student who appears first in the list with that score.