Introduction to Parallel Algorithms and Distributed Computing

Problem statement

How would we count the number of students present in the class?

Solution 1

A naive method to tackle this task would be to assign one student to oversee the counting process and count every student one by one. This procedure will take $N$ steps, which is the number of students in the class.

Upgraded problem statement

Suppose we are in a hall (which has a uniform structure containing some fixed rows and each row has the same fixed chairs) full of an audience, and we want to calculate the number of people. Can we solve this problem more efficiently?