Clearly they should have optimized using binary search. Use nested if-else statements 31 deep. This would require using a more sophisticated comparison like < l

Clearly they should have optimized using binary search. Use nested if-else statements 31 deep. This would require using a more sophisticated comparison like < less than instead of equals. You'd get a similar amount of code, but it would execute on O(logN) instead of O(N). That would surely be the mark of an expert. ;-)