But that's exactly what the author is advocating - exploring the process that the teenager came up with! There was no mention of quicksort, mergesort, bubblesor

But that's exactly what the author is advocating - exploring the process that the teenager came up with! There was no mention of quicksort, mergesort, bubblesort, etc - just that once you start trying to understand how to do something mechanical like sorting, you start to understand how algorithms work.