Go rant

[Kevin Bealer]

dsimcha Wrote:

> == Quote from Kevin Bealer (kevinbealer at gmail.com)'s article
> > (Non-software) people doing routine tasks often come up with better algorithms
> intuitively than my intuition expects them to.
> > I think a lot of people would do even better than insertion with a deck of poker
> cards -- they might group cards by either suit or rank (or rank groups) (e.g.
> "Hmm, I'll make three piles of 1-5, 6-10, and J-A"), then order the "buckets",
> then stick these ordered sets back together.  If you think about it, this is a lot
> like a radix sort or a multi-pivot cousin of the quick sort.
> 
> You mean a bucket sort?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_sort

More or less, though I think human beings use algorithms in a more artistic way than sticking to any one algorithm.

I'm curious if the multi-pivot quicksort (I think everyone gets what I mean by this?  Divide by more than one pivot on each pass?  I can give details if you like ...) has been tried out much.  It seems like it must have been, but it also seems like something that would have cache-awareness advantages that would not show up in the simplified comparison-counting way of thinking about efficiency.

Kevin