Tidy house, tidy mind is a saying that, as in its German variation, implies that order plays an important part in our lives. Anyone who wants to maximize efficiency has to rely on order, or risk the occasional time-consuming search through the chaos that has slowly unfolded. Having things in a particular order is great; it's the process of getting there that is expensive.
This often does not feel like a good use of our time, or simply may not be worth it. While a computer does not exactly feel, the time required to sort things is of a similar cost. Minimizing this time is the goal of inventing new algorithms and improving their efficiency, which is necessary for a task as common as sorting. A call to mycollection.sort() is not expected to take seconds (or minutes or even hours), so this is also a matter of usability. In this chapter, we will explore several...