The challenge is to see how fast of a sort you can make. Theoretically sorting is not an interesting problem, as the proven lower bounds (O(n*lg(n)) for comparison and O(n) for integer sorts) have been achieved numerous ways. However in practice there are wide ranges of speeds. I believe I know the fastest way to sort large amounts of integers (flash sort) and small amount of integers (insertion sort), but it seems there are alot of potential methods for medium amount of numbers.
So this challenge is to see how fast of a program you can write to sort 1000 uniformly random integers from 0 to 2**30-1. To make it easier to measure, perform it 50000 times and report the sum of time. So that we can all run code on the same computer use
http://golf.shinh.org/checker.html the performance checker for shinh's code golf server (accepts like 60+ languages).
You can use
this c code to generate the numbers, measure the time, and check the validity of your sort (it has a slow version of quicksort included). You can use whatever language and testing script you like. You can pass your sort either a linked list or an array (so long as its returns the same data type). Also it can be inplace or not.
Let's say the competition ends in two weeks, march 23. In the meantime please only post times and not the actual algorithm. After this time we can collaborate and combine methods etc. Also this challenge idea is kind of made up without any idea what to expect, so if you have any ideas to change it or suggestions please feel free to post them.
