What different sorting algorithms sound like

I'm not sure, but the visual part of the videos looks a lot like visualizations I've seen in algorithms classes where the speed does represent the speed of the sort. So I'd guess that it does here as well.

These are really great. As a musical person it engrained these concepts that much deeper for me. My wife, who is not much of a computer science person like the merge sort the best.

frio• 16 years ago

Given that the width of the elements being sorted changes (therefore there are more/less elements in different visualisations), I'd say no.

mr_twj• 16 years ago

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.

mhansen• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

I noticed that too! Good stuff.

vijaydev• 16 years ago

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

snprbob86• 16 years ago

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".

momokatte• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

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

ramki• 16 years ago

where is quicksort?

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

Too fast to hear.

But nice to look at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxENKlcs2Tw&feature=relat...

sesqu2• 16 years ago

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

transmit101• 16 years ago

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.

Tichy• 16 years ago

I thought the values to be sorted would be the amplitude of the sound wave, and the value currently touched by the algorithm would be played in each step.

Of course you could still pick arbitrary values and arbitrary start orderings.

noncee22343• 16 years ago

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.

Synaesthesia• 16 years ago

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)

willvarfar• 16 years ago

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

pavs• 16 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

hyyypr• 16 years ago

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).

hubb• 16 years ago

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

Luc• 16 years ago

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

ralph• 16 years ago

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

tfmorris• 16 years ago

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

ysorter78• 16 years ago

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.

jassadat• 16 years ago

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

What different sorting algorithms sound like

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