Re: An effiencient sort algorithm for *people*?

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<julie.siebel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:b9207582-f4f8-4c29-b907-5a57f323fc89@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm trying to build a little app to help someone judge forum art
contests.

Years ago, I had a program for prioritizing task lists. It'd give you
choices - "Which is more important, A or B?", "Which is more important
C or D?", etc. In a remarkably short number of questions, without
repeating any comparisons the list would be in order, most important
to least important.

The cool thing about it wasn't unlike a bubble sort, it didn't compare
A to B, then A to C, then A to D, then A to E, if you see what I mean.
In a bubble sort, if the first value is the highest value and you're
sorting low to high, it gets compared to every number on the list, and
then you go back to the top of the list and do it again...which a
computer doesn't mind, but a person would find kind of boring ;)

Instead, it paired them off in such a way that I don't think any one
question was compared to *every* other question - it was just
interpolated from other choices that were made.

I hope that makes sense; I'm not sure, when I read it back to myself!

I thought something like that would work for her implemented as a web
page (or a spreadsheet?). Give it a list of picture links, she and her
judges can go through and compare "Which do you like best, A or B?",
do that for the different point distributions for her contests (e.g.
Composition, use of materials - heck, I dunno - I'm not an artist -
lol), and then read out weighted scores for her.

Anyone know of a sorting algorithm like that?

You apparently missed an interesting thread here from a while back where
someone came up with a somewhat new sorting algorithm, and some interesting
discussion ensued.

I'll focus on your subject line: sorting algorithm for *people*:

People process information in a manner quite different from the hardwired
algorithms embedded in computer programs. I once taught an intro Fortran
course, and to demonstrate the bubble sort, I used a set of childrens
coloured plastic blocks of different sizes. I also showed that, for a small
sample (i.e. six), the average human could do the sort without any apparent
"calculations", as we can see all the blocks and intuitively know which to
move where.

My point is that it is often as frustrating an exercise to try to get a
computer to process information like a human as the other way around. The
reason, imho, is that we work intuitively, without really understanding how
we do it. I'm a better scripter than chess player, but I play chess
infinitely better than any computer-based algorithm I could come up with to
play against me. That's because I play intuitively, and have no idea how I
make my move choices.

/Al


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