The game dev example is really cool. I've never encountered a situation where "more sorted" is better for performance but completely sorted doesn't really matte

The game dev example is really cool. I've never encountered a situation where "more sorted" is better for performance but completely sorted doesn't really matter (or maybe I have, but didn't know it). When you read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming he challenges you to come up with your own sorting algorithm. I feel really fortunate that I was able to do this without knowing any algorithms already. I came up with bubblesort. I think it was the intuition of thinking about it becoming "more sorted" on each pass that led me there.