Ask Slashdot: How Do You Sort?

camperdave writes "I was recently going through a pile of receipts and other papers to put them into order by date. Lacking one of those fancy sorting sticks they have at the office, I wound up with all sorts of piles and I was getting confused as to which pile was for what. Finally, it struck me: Why don't I use one of the many sorting algorithms I learned back in my computer science classes? So I swept all the papers back into the box and did a radix sort on them. It worked like a charm. Since then, I've had occasion to try quicksorts and merge sorts. So, when you have to physically sort things, what algorithm (if any) do you use?"

Comments

Ob xkcd

[Geoffrey.landis]

The obligatory xkcd

Bogosort

[igny]

I just drop a pile of papers on the staircase, and then repeat if they did not land in the right order.

Shredsort

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Shredsort to be the fastest.

Re:Shredsort

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, that's O(n).

Trashsort is O(1)

Re:GPUs

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Can the shader units of a GPU be harnessed to accelerate sorting?

They can, but you have to either use a very slow GPU, or have very fast fingers.

My method

[synaptik]

I punch 3 holes in every receipt: one each for parent, left, and right. Then I attach them all by string, in a balanced tree. If I need multiple search keys, I just use different colors of string, and different sets of holes. Rebalancing can be a bit of a bitch, after insertion. (I never delete.)

Yes - the Pile sort...

[NotQuiteReal]

Assuming the bottom of the pile is the oldest....

1) decide how tall you would like the pile.
2) move that much of the pile to a temp location.
3) remove the remaining pile to the garbage/recycle/shred bin, as appropriate
4) move the temp pile back to the production pile area.


You never said you were looking for anything... sorting piles of kipple seems to be a rather dull hobby.