I'm reminded of the discovery of the 'modern' variation on the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. Both the original algorithm, and the improvement made in the vari

I'm reminded of the discovery of the 'modern' variation on the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. Both the original algorithm, and the improvement made in the variation, are so simple that it can be trivially understood, and makes one think Oh yeah. Neat. And kinda obvious. (I'd forgotten the particulars so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Took me very little time to piece it back together.) Clearly it's not totally obvious, or it would have made its way into the original paper. Still, the barrier to a Wikipedia-worthy computer science discovery, has risen somewhat since then. Edit Come to think of it, this is a good example for explaining what we mean by 'improved algorithm' to non-software folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#Fisher_and_Yates'_original_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#F...