Anyone who has taken a basic computer science class has undoubtedly spent time devising a sorting algorithm—code that will take an unordered list of items and put them in ascending or descending order ...

Sorting algorithms are a common exercise for new programmers, and for good reason: they introduce many programming fundamentals at once, including loops and conditionals, arrays and lists, comparisons ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard to comprehend, but an exciting new algorithm matters to anyone who ...