Well, people talked about the algorithm... though maybe not in the way I was expecting. Here I will first show you a few places where it is talked about most (and therefore contain many responses from those who understood it, but also a lot more from those who didn't). Then in the next few sections I will highlight a few from those who (1) understood what it is outright and liked it, (2) took them a while, and (3) didn't see what it is and said something frankly quite stupid.
âIs this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever?â https://t.co/ucjbOCh0mA
— Lynn (@chordbug) May 7, 2022
Abstract:
We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct. pic.twitter.com/sYZpagPLAo
Beautiful. https://t.co/bPRnqhCpLS pic.twitter.com/oOpte7UnAF
— Petar VeliÄkoviÄ (@PetarV_93) October 6, 2021
The algorithm seems to be of interest to the formal verification /
automated theorem proving community. In addition to fooling humans, the
algorithm also seems to trip up many simple theorem proving attempts.
For example the following blog post talks about their (difficult)
experience of proving it with SPARK:
I can't believe that I can prove that it can sort
(Thanks, at last someone play along with the name of the algorithm!)
They are also one of the many people who claimed they discovered the same algorithm back in their school days... well we only have their word for that.
Someone else told me privately that they proved its correctness in Coq, used it as a project in a formal verification course at Google, and that "it's proving to be an excellent étude for proof by induction".