ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

HARP (algorithm)

Harp is like a special kind of rule or set of instructions that a computer follows to do a specific task. Imagine you have a big box of different colored toys and your friend asks you to find all the red ones. Normally, you would go through the box one by one, looking at each toy and deciding if it is red or not.

Now let's say there are too many toys and it would take you a long time to look at each one individually. Instead, you might decide to use harp, which is a special way of sorting the toys quickly. With harp, you first divide the toys into smaller groups based on their color. For example, you might make one pile of red toys, one pile of blue toys, and one pile of green toys.

Next, you take the pile of red toys and divide them again into smaller groups based on the shade of red. This way, you can have a group of really dark red toys, a group of slightly lighter red toys, and so on. You keep on dividing and separating the toys until you have all the red toys sorted into different groups based on their specific shades of red.

By using harp, you can easily find all the red toys because they are now organized into different groups based on their colors and shades of red. This makes it much quicker and easier to find what you're looking for.

In the same way, a computer uses harp to quickly and efficiently sort and organize information. It divides the information into smaller groups, then further divides those groups until everything is sorted exactly the way it needs to be. This helps the computer find and process the information it needs much faster.