<story><title>Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm?</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01111</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beyondzero</author><text>This is silly but sort of relevant.&lt;p&gt;During college junior year (1993) as a physics major I took a class in digital electronics (which included 68000 assembler programming). We had a lab contest to create the fastest sorting routine for a set of random unique numbers between x and y.&lt;p&gt;I won the contest by setting to 0 a y-x register range of memory and then inserting each number into the range based on the number itself (&amp;quot;27&amp;quot; into register 27, &amp;quot;18&amp;quot; into register 18, etc.). Then I printed out all non-zero numbers in the range.&lt;p&gt;The other 20 or so students did versions of bubble-sorting and called my solution a cheat. The professor defended my victory as I had not broken any of the rules of the contest...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ttul</author><text>Haha. Reminds me of a lab where we had to program a 6502 to play some sort of game, rendered on an oscilloscope. My genius friend stayed up all night writing code that rendered the snake by dynamically writing code, rather than the obvious approach of reading the “snake” coordinates and rendering those to the screen.&lt;p&gt;Our snake code ran at something obscene like 1,000 Hz. So much faster than anyone else’s. The professor couldn’t understand how we did it, so gave a low mark.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm?</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01111</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beyondzero</author><text>This is silly but sort of relevant.&lt;p&gt;During college junior year (1993) as a physics major I took a class in digital electronics (which included 68000 assembler programming). We had a lab contest to create the fastest sorting routine for a set of random unique numbers between x and y.&lt;p&gt;I won the contest by setting to 0 a y-x register range of memory and then inserting each number into the range based on the number itself (&amp;quot;27&amp;quot; into register 27, &amp;quot;18&amp;quot; into register 18, etc.). Then I printed out all non-zero numbers in the range.&lt;p&gt;The other 20 or so students did versions of bubble-sorting and called my solution a cheat. The professor defended my victory as I had not broken any of the rules of the contest...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>catwell</author><text>This is a slightly simpler (because of unicity) version of bucket sort or counting sort.</text></comment>