Loops are often used as an easy way to find the position of an item in an array of items. For example, to find the position of 19 in a list, you might write a for loop to check the list at each position from the first item to the last until it finds 19. But what if the list is already sorted? If so, there is a better way, called binary search. But it takes a little more from the programmer to make this work. In this section you'll learn about speeding up searching and sorting. Though you'll rarely need to resort to algorithms, this may come up when you're dealing with large amounts of data that seem to freeze your computer when using normal looping methods.