I had gotten word that the sorting problem has been solved, hence the "disregarding prior art" part. My point, which you don't seem to be contradicting, is tha

I had gotten word that the sorting problem has been solved, hence the "disregarding prior art" part. My point, which you don't seem to be contradicting, is that a formal specification of a problem is not the same as a solution. They just seem the same because real world programming problems tend to have obvious solutions, or at least solutions that don't feel much like programming.