Genetic Algorithm Improves Shellsort

gstover writes "As a personal programming project recently, I used a genetic algorithm to find a better sequence of increments for Shellsort. It found at least one sequence that out-performs the best previously known by about 5 percent. Here is an article about it (also here). I believe this is the first time a genetic algorithm has actually improved Shellsort."

Comments

Re:Nice and all

[Gumshoe]

I guess it's a nice thing that shellsort is getting improved, and I do realize that this is great for genetic research, but, pardon me for being an uneducated ignorant bastard, does it have any practical value, seeing as quicksort is much faster than shellsort? Or am I wrong?

You're generalising, which is an easy mistake. Quicksort is good but for many data sets, it is very likely suboptimal and another alogorithm would perform better. Shellsort is good for small data sets. In fact, a good quicksort implementation may use shellsort once the divisions get small enough.

Another example:, quicksort is poor at sorting strings. This is because you have to perform a full strcmp() (or equivalent) at each comparison. For this reason, a modified radix sort is often used.