
Ask HN: Did you use the principle of sorting/hashing in your personal life? - satran
I was reading the paper on Computational Thinking by Jeannette M. Wing[1]. In it there was a section about how it was used in daily life. Here are a few examples:<p>Hashing. After a talk I gave at a department faculty meeting on my computational thinking vision, Danny Sleator came up to tell me that at his home they use a particular hashing function to store away Lego pieces. According to Sleator, they hash on these categories: rectangular thick blocks, other thick (non-rectangular) blocks, thins (of any shape), wedgies, axles, rivets and spacers, fits on axle, ball and socket, and miscellaneous. They even have rules to classify pieces that could fit into more than one category. He said that “Even though this is pretty crude, it saves about a factor of 10 when looking for a piece.” Avrim Blum overheard Danny telling me this story and chimed in to say “At our home, we use a different hash function.”<p>Sorting. The following story is taken verbatim from an email sent by Roger Dannenberg, a professional trumpeter and computer scientist. “I showed up to a big band gig, and the band leader passed out books with maybe 200 unordered charts and a set list with about 40 titles we were supposed to get out and place in order, ready to play. Everyone else started searching through the stack, pulling out charts one-at-a-time. I decided to sort the 200 charts alphabetically O(N log(N)) and then pull the charts O(M log(N)). I was still sorting when other band members were half-way through their charts, and I started to get some funny looks, but in the end, I finished first. That&#x27;s computational thinking.”<p>Do you have some experiences about how you used computational thinking either in your personal life or at work?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~CompThink&#x2F;resources&#x2F;TheLinkWing.pdf
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gus_massa
I think it's better to submit this as a link. Submission without link have a
penalty and it's more difficult that they reach the front page.

Also, to sort alphabetically the test of ~200 students the method I use is to
split the pile in 6 smaller piles (something like A-C, D-F, G-L, M-Q, R-T,
U-Z). Then split each pile in subpiles one for each letter, and then sort the
subpiles. Sometimes the subpiles of one letter are small and fuzzy, sometimes
it's useful to split a subpile of one letter in half. You can call it radix
sort if you like.

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satran
Thanks, sadly i can't now add a link to this. When I edit it the URL field is
blocked.

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gus_massa
Just make a new submission, and delete this post. Or just post a link to the
new submission here as a comment.

