How To Sort Cases of Beer

You know, I have you to thank for checking out all sorts (pun intended) of sorting methods. Wikipedia has a nice list of sorting algorithm, but my favorite is the Bogosort:

It was developed by Salvatore Aranzulla. If bogosort were used to sort a deck of cards, it would consist of checking if the deck were in order, and if it were not, throwing the deck into the air, picking the cards up at random, and repeating the process until the deck is sorted. Its name comes from the word bogus.

It is not useful for sorting, but may be used for educational purposes, to contrast it with other more realistic algorithms; it has also been used as an example in logic programming.

My favorite example of a single level bubble sort is organizing a deck of cards. One at a time, a card is compared with its neighbor until all are in order. A much faster method is to first separate the cards into suits and then order them. This is a two level bubble sort.

A college job was to organize purchase orders and invoices for a department that never organized anything. I first sorted by year, then month and finally by day. A three level bubble sort with alpha and beta decision tree cutting.

Yeah, my husband pointed out the article to me at the time. What was management thinking?!!!!

Ah, this reminds me of how Carlsberg workers went on strike a while ago because the company restricted the amount of free beer they can drink during their working day!

I learned something new today: Bubble Sort - thanks Edward!