Binary tree is one of the most important data structures in the programming world. The basic definition can be given as follows (as mentioned in one of the data structures book by Tenenbaum). "A ...

The transmitting computer codes the data into this simplified binary signal, a machine language that is incomprehensible to our conventional sense organs.

Both a sorted array and a binary tree can let you look up an element in log(N) time. However I would expect a sorted array to be faster in practice because of the constant factor. However ...