where is quicksort?
Too fast to hear. But nice to look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxENKlcs2Tw&feature=relat...
Bullshit on the too fast. Mergesort never needs more comparisons than quicksort, and mergesort was featured.
What different sorting algorithms sound like
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#32Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too fast to hear. But nice to look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxENKlcs2Tw&feature=relat...
Bullshit on the too fast. Mergesort never needs more comparisons than quicksort, and mergesort was featured.
Merge sort may use an optimal number of comparisons, but that doesn't stop it from being slower than quicksort in most cases in real life.
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#34At times this sounds a lot like an old Williams shoot'em-up arcade game, like Defender for example.
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit on the too fast. Mergesort never needs more comparisons than quicksort, and mergesort was featured.
Errm. Yes. I know that. It was a joke...
I've noticed that we don't share the same sense of humour.
Generally speaking, I've seen too many people assert that quicksort is blazingly fast to believe all of them were joking. It doesn't particularly help that the major sorting algorithms are severely fragmented, because people optimize variously for stability, time, space, comparisons, swaps, cache locality, parallelizability, best case, worst case, average case, amortized average case, arrays, lists, integers, objects...
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Errm. Yes. I know that. It was a joke...
I've noticed that we don't share the same sense of humour. Generally speaking, I've seen too many people assert that quicksort is blazingly fast to believe all of them were joking. It doesn't particularly help that the major sorting algorithms are severely fragmented, because people optimize variously for stability, time, space, comparisons, swaps, cache locality, parallelizability, best case, worst case, average cas…
quicksort has very bad performance on the wrong data.
But on the kind of data that the test showed it would perform more or less on par with merge sort. To suggest that quick sort would be that much faster than merge sort that you couldn't hear it when there are obviously quite a few steps is to me more than enough reason to assume a joke rather than a serious answer.
Anyway, humour is a hard thing to get across online, I should have added a ;) at a minimum apologies for that, also HN seems to frown on humor (even though every now and then there are some really good jokes here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1597571 ) this one was reasonably lame but the subject wasn't all that serious to begin with.
Sorting is enough of an issue that Knuth devoted the better part of a very thick book to it and to this day there are plenty of people that think that 'one size fits all'.
The more you know about your data the faster you can sort it.
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#37Why does the bubble sort continue to the end of the array on every pass, when it could stop one earlier each time?
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#38Interesting, but not new. Mark Brown did this two decades ago at DEC SRC (and probably others before him). http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-76A.html
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#39See another experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5ml9e2THw
It sonifies the following algorithms (from http://www.algolist.net/Algorithms/ ) - Bubble sort - Selection sort - Insertion sort - Quicksort
You can also see their sonograms.
Re: What different sorting algorithms sound like
#40Here is a live version of the sounds of various sorting algorithms. Done using HTML 5 audio - http://bit.ly/sort-sound