
What different sorting algorithms sound like - pavs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8g-iYGHpEA
======
transmit101
Disclaimer: sorting algorithms can sound like just about anything, depending
which parameters you map to which sounds.

This is just a simple example of data sonification, albeit with some nice
visualisation too, and a subject matter which appeals to the computer
scientists in the room.

~~~
noncee22343
No. Under some simple guidelines, which the model follows, the sorting
algorithms won't sound like just about anything.

If you sort random permutations of the values [1, n], and map some monotonic
property to the values, then not only are there provably some sounds which
certain algorithms make that others don't, but more generally there are
'average case' signatures for each algorithm that give them their own
recognizable cadences, and that is exactly what this video is demonstrating.

That you can use a 'boop' or a 'beep' or 'buzz' or invert the monotonicity is
obvious and irrelevant.

------
momokatte
This makes me want to sort something. The loose change strewn all over my
desk. The contents of my fridge. The words on this page. Anything.

~~~
petdog
Anything. The The The This all change contents desk. fridge. loose makes me my
my of on over page. something. sort strewn this to want words

~~~
jacquesm
all Anything. change contents desk. fridge. loose makes me my my of on over
page. something. sort strewn The The The This this to want words

------
hyyypr
Awesome link. It reminds me of a website showing a matrix with visualizations
of several sorting algorithms: <http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/> (which was
posted somewhere here iirc).

------
ramki
where is quicksort?

~~~
jacquesm
Too fast to hear.

But nice to look at:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxENKlcs2Tw&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxENKlcs2Tw&feature=related)

~~~
sesqu
Bullshit on the too fast. Mergesort never needs more comparisons than
quicksort, and mergesort was featured.

~~~
jacquesm
Errm. Yes. I know that. It was a joke...

~~~
sesqu
I've noticed that we don't share the same sense of humour.

Generally speaking, I've seen too many people assert that quicksort is
blazingly fast to believe all of them were joking. It doesn't particularly
help that the major sorting algorithms are severely fragmented, because people
optimize variously for stability, time, space, comparisons, swaps, cache
locality, parallelizability, best case, worst case, average case, amortized
average case, arrays, lists, integers, objects...

~~~
jacquesm
quicksort has very bad performance on the wrong data.

But on the kind of data that the test showed it would perform more or less on
par with merge sort. To suggest that quick sort would be that much faster than
merge sort that you couldn't hear it when there are obviously quite a few
steps is to me more than enough reason to assume a joke rather than a serious
answer.

Anyway, humour is a hard thing to get across online, I should have added a ;)
at a minimum apologies for that, also HN seems to frown on humor (even though
every now and then there are some really good jokes here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1597571> ) this one was reasonably lame
but the subject wasn't all that serious to begin with.

Sorting is enough of an issue that Knuth devoted the better part of a very
thick book to it and to this day there are plenty of people that think that
'one size fits all'.

The more you know about your data the faster you can sort it.

------
tfmorris
Interesting, but not new. Mark Brown did this two decades ago at DEC SRC (and
probably others before him). <http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-
DEC/SRC-RR-76A.html>

------
hubb
i know the choice of sounds was arbitrary, but it nonetheless reminded me of
the seal calls of 'encounters at the end of the world':
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SORza1fqQGk>

------
snprbob86
That was super cool! I really enjoyed how my brain started matching the sound
and the bar heights in such a way that by the end I said "of course that one
sounds like that".

------
ysorter78
See another experiment: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5ml9e2THw>

It sonifies the following algorithms (from
<http://www.algolist.net/Algorithms/> ) \- Bubble sort \- Selection sort \-
Insertion sort \- Quicksort

You can also see their sonograms.

------
meatmanek
What, no quick sort? And no heap sort?

~~~
Batsu
There was a link to the heapsort at the end:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXAjiDQbPSw>

~~~
moultano
That is by far the coolest sounding of the bunch.

------
Synaesthesia
I think Mathematica can be used to make "audiolizations" really easily. They
include one of the Riemman Zeta function as a demo. It sounds really cool
(sorry I can't find a link, I'll try upload it)

------
keyle
That was really cool. Is the speed indicative of the speed of the sort?

~~~
mr_twj
I would say it's likely. There are all sorts (pun intended) of optimizations
you can do for each algorithm, but at the textbook level, I could say they
seemed typical as far as speed expectancy goes. My rough estimates for the
times were (in seconds): insert: ~10, bubble: ~27, selection: ~18, merge: ~17,
and gnome: ~19. I have only written inserts, bubbles, and selections; with
bubble being slowest and insert being the fastest, my limited experience
agrees with the video. Note: the merge algorithm appeared to have sorted a
different data set.

------
jassadat
Here is a live version of the sounds of various sorting algorithms. Done using
HTML 5 audio - <http://bit.ly/sort-sound>

------
muyyatin
It would be interesting to listen to graph algorithms.

~~~
scotth
What do you imagine would determine frequency?

~~~
muyyatin
For example in depth first search, the depth.

~~~
dhs
I like that. And in breadth first search, one could use a filter on a saw wave
to have the breadth of the frequency spectrum manipulated by the search.

------
ralph
Why does the bubble sort continue to the end of the array on every pass, when
it could stop one earlier each time?

------
mhansen
There's a lot of effort been put in to this, I like it.

I love that you can hear the bubbling in bubble sort :D

~~~
marktucker
I noticed that too! Good stuff.

------
Technophilis
Merge sort's sound is actually recursive.

------
Luc
At times this sounds a lot like an old Williams shoot'em-up arcade game, like
Defender for example.

------
vijaydev
Cool job! Gnome Sort - now that's new to me!

------
willvarfar
bubble sort sounds like someone chanting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
!!!! :D

~~~
pavs
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE>

