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The World of YouTube Bubble Sort Algorithm Dancing
theodp writes In addition to The Ghost of Steve Jobs, The Codecracker, a remix of 'The Nutcracker' performed by Silicon Valley's all-girl Castilleja School during Computer Science Education Week earlier this month featured a Bubble Sort Dance. Bubble Sort dancing, it turns out, is more popular than one might imagine. Search YouTube, for example, and you'll find students from the University of Rochester to Osmania University dancing to sort algorithms. Are you a fan of Hungarian folk-dancing? Well there's a very professionally-done Bubble Sort Dance for you! Indeed, well-meaning CS teachers are pushing kids to Bubble Sort Dance to hits like Beauty and a Beat, Roar, Gentleman, Heartbeat, Under the Sea, as well as other music.
A key part of all database systems is the fact that you can ask for a sort order without having to write a sort program. While simple sorts can move quickly, a bubble sort can move even faster. When you're dealing with a multimillion record table, this saves minutes and power per query.
Everybody develops Bubble Sort the same way, proving it's an eventual discovery that no longer qualifies for patents. Teaching it is a basic way of showing the programming language's loop terms and variable scopes, so it's an elementary program to write.
I guess this dance is reminding us that Bubble Sort can be applied to dating. If the girls rank themselves correctly, it takes a bunch of "go over there..." dates in order to get it right.
I don't think we should be teaching our kids exponential running time O(n^2) algorithms.
Call me liberal, but I don't think we should be teaching our kids improper definitions for "exponential" *or* myths that O(n^2) algorithms like bubble sort are bad.
Quick: which is going to be faster to sort a list of 4 items, bubble sort or randomized partition merge sort? What's that you say? Proper algorithm selection requires more than knee-jerk application of platitudes? Exactly.
It's usually mentioned in CS courses because the first stage in introducing these classes is "think about sorting some numbers - how do you go about doing it", and generally Bubble Sort is the first formalisation that falls out of that. The fact that Selection Sort is the one that you think of is neither here nor there - most students come up with something looking like bubble sort.
It entirely depends on the order of data in the database. If you know the data is already mostly sorted, then it can perform much better than other methods.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!