QuickSort in real life

[pne]

Knowing how to QuickSort can come in handy in real life

(May not make as much sense if you're not a CS geek or at least have some CS background)

Comments

[fweebles.livejournal.com]

When I taught CS, (well, was a teaching assistant), we'd go down to the printer every Monday and pick up ~800 assignments that had been handed in electronically over the weekend and printed.

Two of us would sit in the office and quicksort all the assignments (none of which were stapled together, so each assignment consisted of 3-15 pages!) and then staple them together.

It was a nice relaxing way to spend Monday morning, just chatting, sorting and stapling.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Wow. I don't think I would have thought of quicksorting them.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure I could even quicksort by hand.

But then on the other hand, I never studied CS so I never took algorithms - I more or less know of them but I don't know them.

[fweebles.livejournal.com]

Heh, quicksort was one of things that was part of the course (as it was "introduction to data structures and algorithms"), so it was pretty obvious to do it that way. :)

We even had the quicksort-radixsort-shellsort argument several times over the year or so that I worked there. :)