No other computational problem has been studied in more depth, or yielded a greater number of useful solutions, than sorting. Historically, business computers spent 25% of their time doing nothing but sorting data (Knuth, 2014c), and many advanced algorithms start by sorting their inputs. Dozens of algorithms have been proposed over the last 80-odd years, but there is no “best” solution to the sorting problem. Although many popular sorting algorithms were known as early as the 1940s, researchers are still designing improved versions – Python’s default algorithm was only implemented in the early 2000s and Java’s current version in the 2010s.
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