
Pessimal Algorithms and Simplexity Analysis (1984) [pdf] - signa11
http://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/pasa.pdf
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bo1024
The Jules Verne references were the funniest part to me.

But it's definitely an interesting and intriguing, if totally useless,
question: What is the slowest possible algorithm for a problem that "doesn't
waste time"?

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quchen
As much as I love Slowsort, it _is_ an inefficient mergesort, so you could
argue that it does indeed waste time on a sub-routine. On the other hand, the
tree numbering cannot be made more efficient by replacing a part of the
algorithm with something smarter, so I’d say it’s the better pessimal
algorithm.

That said, Slowsort is still my favourite, for it has all the properties of a
good sorting algorithm: stable, easy to parallelize, easily proven correct,
easily made in-place.

