Internship Experience: Sorting Competition with the Boss

I fix a sorting problem, but my boss and I end up in a little bit of a competition which he eventually wins. (Times in the video are approximate.)
Original program used "bubble sort"
I wrote a binary tree sort.
He wrote (I think) a quick sort.
I modified my binary tree sort to randomize the indices before sorting.
He wrote (I think) a merge sort and won, by reducing the time to sort the database from about 29 hours to about half an hour.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• cooperative
• internship
• intern
• programming
• sorting
• competition

[TheFallibleFiend]

I never took Cobol, but did write a program in it once - agonizing.

[TheFallibleFiend]

"I remember the 29 hour jobs. heh "

The thing was that this sort had to be run every day!

[Brianswers]

I remember the 29 hour jobs. heh

[x246869]

We had a little class assignment in Cobol (last century) to sort 3 numbers in A,B,C and when done A being smallest, C largest. I was surprised at how much thought had to go into doing this simple little exercise.

But then it was Cobol :)

[TheFallibleFiend]

Correct ... about 81 or 82, I think.

[WarmWeatherGuy]

I am guessing this was before Numerical Recipes came out in 1986. Since then I have never tried to beat Quicksort.