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This New Algorithm for Sorting Books or Files Is Close to Perfection
The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal.
Last year, in a study that was presented at the Foundations of Computer Science conference in Chicago, a team of seven researchers described a way to organize items that comes tantalizingly close to the theoretical ideal. “It’s a very important problem,” said Seth Pettie, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, because many of the data structures we rely upon today store information sequentially. In a 2022 paper, Bender, Kuszmaul, and four coauthors created just such an algorithm—one that was “history independent,” non-smooth, and randomized—which finally reduced the 1981 upper bound, bringing the average insertion time down to (log n) 1.5.
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