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I finally put my whiteboard back up that’s been down since before Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower space overhead that turned ou
by hinkley 2y ago
I finally put my whiteboard back up that’s been down since before Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower space overhead that turned out to be an artifact of non-representative sample inputs. As Bletchley Park taught us, humans are terrible at randomness.
No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money is better spent on something else.
- peterburkimsher 2y agoGreat! Would you be able to describe the sorting algorithm as a comment here, to open-source it? Also, if you’d like a free magnet for your whiteboard, I’ll happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)
- hinkley 2y agoTypically you merge a block A and block B into a new block C that has the same length as A + B. I thought I saw a way to use a few extra pointers and some swap operations to turn A and B into C by chipping away at their left ends, and still being a stable sort. The examples I came up with worked and confirmation bias took over. But in real data there were combinations of runs that broke the algorithm.