Pixel Sorts

Pixel Sorts scrambles a picture and sorts it back together, one algorithm at a time, so you can watch the difference between them instead of reading about it. Every pixel carries the number of the place it came from. Scrambling shuffles those numbers, sorting puts them back in order, and the image reassembles. You are not watching colours being sorted. You are watching a permutation being undone, which is what makes progress legible: you can see how far from finished the algorithm still is. Twelve algorithms are included: bubble sort, branchless bubble sort, SIMD odd-even transposition, parallel odd-even transposition, selection sort, insertion sort, shell sort, heap sort, merge sort, quicksort, GCD quicksort and radix sort. Each one reports what it actually did: elapsed time, comparisons and swaps, and its big-O. The table keeps every run, so the comparison is measured on your own…