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Sorting Algorithms As Dances
mikejuk writes "You may well have seen many simulations of sorting algorithms that aim to show how the algorithm works. However I guarantee that you have never seen anything quite in the same league as the videos made by Sapientia University — they are simply crazy but in the nicest possible way. They folk dance their way though bubble sort, shell sort, insertion sort and selection sort. Very, very weird but you find you can't but help checking that they are doing it right. Now anyone want to try quicksort?"
That's why we use computers for algorithms. Neat idea though.
...but it was indistinguishable from a bunch of drunk guys stumbling around in a crowded SF Muni station.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
See how long it takes? It ain't the quick sort, son.
I'm disappointed that they don't have a video demonstrating Stooge Sort.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'd love to see parallel versions.. Much more action that way. Confusing? I think it could be beautiful.
Grab your partner and look her in the eye,
Push her to the right if you're lookin' t'ward at the sky
Pass her to the left if your eyes are looking low.
Lather, rinse, repeat folks - Do Si Do.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Anyone participating in these dances is unlikely to ever be permitted to mate with anyone of the opposite sex. So I guess this is a genetic sorting algorithm called "End-of-the-line sort". Now all we need to make this truly cringeworth is the right (wrong!) lyrics.
"Baby, you've reached the end of the line tonight See-Arrr-Elll-Effff!
There ain't no way you'll pass on your code tonight See-Arrr-Elll-Effff!"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
They'd have to be able to do something similar to mitosis: split in two repeatedly and then merge again.
Or maybe something like Inception wherein it's a dance within a dream within a dream within the Matrix within a dream.
..quickstep.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
I guarantee that you have never seen anything quite in the same league as the videos made by Sapientia University
Without diminishing the creativity of these videos, I recommend that if you enjoyed these you might do a Google search for "Dance Your PhD".
Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/and-the-dance-your-phd-winner-is.html
Nucleic acids never looked so good.
Another nicely weird s.a.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
My intro-to-CS professor (20 years ago... my, how time flies) used to illustrate sorting algorithms by sorting the students in class by height. :)
Once someone participates in a sorting algorithm, they sure won't forget
A quantum bogosort could be solved with a time complexity of O(n).
That's several spawned universes worth of stumbling, drunken Muni passengers (or dancers), and one hell of an efficient sort.
Now I wanna see a dance of bits being changed in an ALU. That should be entertaining.
Heck, we could even write an asm program and have it ran by a dance processor...
Yeah, there's never been any kind of line dance where the dancers split into two groups, do stuff, and than merge back into the larger group in some ordered fashion....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That was cool, but when clicking the link I really, really wanted to see quicksort done as a dance. Curse me and my expectations.
Anybody know of any entertaining visual representation of quicksort?
Actually this is probably what dance theory is all about right? Might provide a useful abstraction of the subject though. Maybe there's a thesis in this for some non-tech averse grad student!
They tried it. Unfortunately, the camera watching them always destroyed the quantum state. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
you mean like this dance ?
Good point. I was more focused on the call recursion and was not able to think about the "recursed" group being able to separate themselves from the main group by stepping forward and doing the dance/sort there.
First, I want to point out that line dancing and merge sort are clearly made for each other. Second, I just realized that bubble sort with n processors is linear time, right? It might also make for a more interesting dance, seeing all adjacent pairs do the little move at the same time... Or would that be too busy?
I suppose the real problem is that if you take advantage of parallelism, a sort-dance could be over before anyone had a chance to see what was going on.
Not quicksort though. That would be a cool dance, as long as you pre-unsort the dancers to avoid the degenerate case: The "pivot" steps out, then the whole line comes forward and crosses to either side based on the comparison, then each side does the same trick, so you want at least the first iteration to be fairly even.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...to see a dance of spaghetti sort.
I am not devoid of humor.