None of you probably know this, but I work selling computer games. Yeah, it’s cool – but as a computer engineer, sometimes I need to challenge myself a little bit more to pass the time. One of the hectic requirements of this job is that all walls and shelves need to have all cases sorted alphabetically.
I did some study on sorting in recent course work at university, but hadn’t ever really got much of a chance to really wonder about real world implications. Attempting to break this poor stance of mine, I promptly began on taking some rough statistical analysis of the efficiencies of various sorting algorithms with a variety of sized lists. For the record, bubblesorting was never tried. Never.
The wikipedia page for sorting matched up quite well with my findings. Insertion sort was great for smallish lists, but horrible when organising 200 PS2 games. Not surprisingly, I tend to use a hybrid of the algorithms, mainly based off insertion and heap sorting. Now I’ll have to find another way of amusing myself!
One of the GNOME developers (“the algorithms guy” is what they call him on IRC) wrote some blog entries a while back about different sorting algorithms and how to optimise some of them. It was a really interesting read (have it bookmarked
http://primates.ximian.com/~fejj/blog/archives/cat_algorithms.html
Thought you might find some of it interesting
Heh, I use bubblesort in amaroK in two places I think. But that’s because the code is readable and the list size is the number of audio-engines, so at the most that was once 5.
Bubblesort has the advantage that it is simple to write and simple to read, which is especially important when the objects you are sorting are not simple to compare with each other. IMO.
What I’d prefer is some easier way to use the std sort functions. I always seem to end up with a QMap where I need to sort the map with the foo data member of the something class as key.
I meant QMap [Something, Bar], but your blog swallows < > unless you type them as html entities.
Yeah. I agree.
wow seb u need to get out more