Sorting is a basic part of any computer science program. My sister and I are currently engaged in helping my parents move. As part of that effort I am spending sorting things, which has reminded me of another place where it can be useful to apply things you learn in one field to another.
Bucket and Radix sorts are basic sorting approaches taught in any good algorithms class. The process involves sorting like items into buckets, and then resorting items, either within those buckets (bucket sort), or by their next property (radix sort).
In practice, as a developer I nearly never implement my own sorting algorithms; a language library is almost certainly going to be better optimized than what I would write, and it already exists. What’s more these two sorting processes are rarely the best in practice for most datasets. But in real life, we need to sort stuff all the time, and where these don’t make sense in many computing settings they are often the best way to sort physical stuff.
I spent my evening applying this theory to sorting the coins my father has collected over time (he’s actually a few feet away sorting more coins right now). I took the embedded picture mid-process this evening between having gathered coins by type, and was pulling out Quarters for collecting vs rolling — other denominations will come later. My sister and I have been helping prepare for the move with a similar process on a larger scale of gathering like-items together to help review and pack them as we progress. There is even science behind the concept that this is the most efficient way to sort things.
Unlike that article, my point is not just to help you sort things faster, but to support for my general argument that having well rounded education is the best form of education for life-long engagement. When I first read the article saying that radix sort was the fastest way to sort socks it made total sense to me – I already sorted socks that way because I’d realized it helped break the problem down. I took the idea from the same place the author did, my computer science training.
Generally I make this argument in the reverse; non-CS courses made me better as a developer. But it’s just as true that my CS courses taught me things that make my day-to-day life better.
No one field has all the answers to our problems as individuals or as a society.
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