Talk:Spaghetti sort

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[edit] Algorithm explanation

I believe this explanation needs a bit of rewriting; it seems like it should be a fairly simple concept, but I can't follow it.

Spaghetti sort appears to be, from what I can tell so far, just a way to visualize bucket sort. Would this be accurate to say? ~ Booyabazooka 23:12, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

It definitely needs work. It's said to be an "analog" sorting algorithm, ie. if you really are trying to sort spaghetti rods this explains how to do it using your hands. It's not a computer algorithm. It might be possible to translate it into one but then it just becomes the selection sort.

The link to "AK Dewdney's homepage" doesn't seem to yield any information about this sorting method.Friendly Person 15:43, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Spaghetti sort is described in Dewdney's book The Armchair Universe.

The real trick is that it's massively parallel. Think of the length of each stick as a bit of data, and each point where the tips of a stick contacts the table/hand as a processor. So each processor operates on one data value, in parallell. This parallelism is why it's not practical to implement it on a traditional computer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.168.92.132 (talk) 01:27, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Definitely needs rewriting, to describe it in terms of computers. 64.91.186.214 (talk) 14:02, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Why does it have to be described in terms of computers? It's not a computer algorithm. Not every algorithm is. Cairnarvon (talk) 13:10, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] finding m

Missing: finding the largest number to size your full-length spaghetti is also linear in the length of the list, assuming you have someplace to stash the best so far. If you have to mark and rewind (for big numbers when storage is scarce), you could in the worst case have to go through the list twice. Julian Morrison (talk) 00:34, 26 March 2008 (UTC)