Alipay Top Up Problem: A Case Study of Algorithms Make a Better Decision

Alipay is one of the most popular mobile payment platforms that has been widely used all over the world, especially in China. An Alipay account could link many debit cards to top up Alipay's balance. This paper studies an Alipay account topping up the problem with an unknown balance debit card to transfer all the money from the debit card to the Alipay account. This paper applied a binary search algorithm, random search algorithm, and hybrid algorithm for solving the studied problem. We also developed a web-based simulation tool to analyze human behavior when they top up their Alipay with an unknown balance debit card. A case study is conducted on 58 students from Zhengzhou University. From the experiments, we find that students with knowledge of algorithms will be more effective compared with those without learning algorithms,