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Sorting Visualizations

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Re: Sorting Visualizations

#21

Post by cup-of-tea »

jasonwelk wrote: post #15

Compared to other visualization, having the extra axis dimension just means what, that the sorting is being done as if each row was an independent sort, and all rows are being sorted simultaneously?

Yeah it's one sort per line all running in parallel. The lines start off shuffled independently and have the same algorithm run on each line.

A nice side effect of this is that some lines of quicksort finish much more quickly than other lines. That is the major downside to quicksort (other than being non-stable in its fastest versions).

Re: Sorting Visualizations

#22

Post by cup-of-tea »

These are neat but it's a bit odd to call heapsort and mergesort bizarre. Sure if you just think about them as operating on arrays they would seem strange, but if you think about them more abstractly they make complete sense.

Re: Sorting Visualizations

#24

Post by pvillano »

I really wish the frame rate was every n comparisons or seconds instead of the rate of the outer loop. In the first four, the boundary between sorted and unsorted should accelerate and the progression of merge sort should be constant. Heapsort should also accelerate, but at a different rate from the n^2 sorts. It would be so much more satisfying.

Re: Sorting Visualizations

#25

Post by reikonomusha »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #16

Good stuff, except for the rainbow color scales [1]. I'd much prefer to see the same in viridis [2] or something similar. The color boundaries on the rainbow scale are not perceived uniformly by human eyes (there might even be a cultural bias at play, i.e. we may distinguish blue from green more readily than different shades of blue, even if they may be objectively at the same distance) [1] https://visual.ly/blog/rai…

Sorting is about relative distance anyway. “Am I closer than you to negative infinity?” Why does having absolute perception matter? (Indeed, all but radix sort use comparison-based strategies. There’s some notion of a “less than” operation being used to make decisions.)

Viridis is useful for scientific plots where scale perception is important in making a good conclusion. I don’t think demonstrating sorting requires the same perception.

Re: Sorting Visualizations

#26

Post by [deleted] »

reikonomusha wrote: post #25
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #16

Good stuff, except for the rainbow color scales [1]. I'd much prefer to see the same in viridis [2] or something similar. The color boundaries on the rainbow scale are not perceived uniformly by human eyes (there might even be a cultural bias at play, i.e. we may distinguish blue from green more readily than different shades of blue, even if they may be objectively at the same distance) [1] https://visual.ly/blog/rai…

Sorting is about relative distance anyway. “Am I closer than you to negative infinity?” Why does having absolute perception matter? (Indeed, all but radix sort use comparison-based strategies. There’s some notion of a “less than” operation being used to make decisions.) Viridis is useful for scientific plots where scale perception is important in making a good conclusion. I don’t think demonstrating sorting requires…

[deleted]

Re: Sorting Visualizations

#27

Post by XaspR8d »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #16

Good stuff, except for the rainbow color scales [1]. I'd much prefer to see the same in viridis [2] or something similar. The color boundaries on the rainbow scale are not perceived uniformly by human eyes (there might even be a cultural bias at play, i.e. we may distinguish blue from green more readily than different shades of blue, even if they may be objectively at the same distance) [1] https://visual.ly/blog/rai…

Or if you still want a rainbow to satisfy personal design desires, cubehelix and HCL both provide great perceptively-balanced scales.

That said, I usually prefer subsets, like viridis.

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