From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,385be4c68a9e4de6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-07-15 15:09:16 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!sn-xit-05!sn-xit-06!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail From: achrist@easystreet.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Smart sorting algorithm ? Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:08:43 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Message-ID: <3D3347EB.99F26335@easystreet.com> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <3D21D581.6EF6CB06@despammed.com> <3D2A0A25.52A62B7C@despammed.com> <3D2D98DB.39944A80@despammed.com> <5ee5b646.0207111204.618a9bfa@posting.google.com> <3D332482.DB080483@despammed.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:27125 Date: 2002-07-15T15:08:43-07:00 List-Id: If you have to invent something to improve the process, where comparisons are done by humans according to rules unknown, then there is perhaps some chance to improve the overall speed. Can you give the humans lists of 5-20 items at a time to sort, and use the information from these sorted sub-lists in some near optimal way to produce an overall sort order? If there is any machine algorithm that can get you into the neighborhood and put an approximately sorted list of a few items on a screen for the person to re-arrange into a correctly sorted list, you should be able to extract information from the human much faster than you would be getting it by presenting simple pairwise comparisons. The optimal algorithm when comparisons are m-way like that IDK, but coming up with one should give lots of opportunity for you to be creative. Al Wes Groleau wrote: > > > Once again, this is a dead-end idea. It cannot possibly > > Well, I'm not convinced--although I do respect > your higher-than-mine education and experience > in this area. If you provide a "proof" or > a link to a proof, I'll try to understand it. > Intuitively, I get foggy images of why it might > be true, but the wishful thinking is quite > powerful in this case. > > > be any help if you are using a good sorting algorithm > > that minimizes comparisons in the first place, and if > > I am convinced of the value of such, > but since that is not enough in this case...... > > -- > Wes Groleau > http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau