I personally think distributed networks with smart contracts are going to be "a thing" soon, and in that kind of environment virtual cpu cycles are constrained

I personally think distributed networks with smart contracts are going to be "a thing" soon, and in that kind of environment virtual cpu cycles are constrained to a level where an Intel 8080 processor looks like a speed demon. In that type of environment, you need to do a lot of thinking about basic algorithm science, including exploring the many types of sorting algos. (Here's some code I'm working on right now in that vein, which helps to perform efficient percentile calculations in a smart contract https://github.com/drcode/ethereum-order-statistic-tree https://github.com/drcode/ethereum-order-statistic-tree)