[toppy]

The broader contexts could be this: look at this puzzle as a way for reinvent sorting as a delegation of operations (split + combine) instead of traditional "swapping" of values. As CPU arithmetic is faster then memory operations some real treasure may be hidden in this new approach.

[Thiez]

That is clearly nonsense, as the results of performing the arithmetic still need to be written back to memory, so it's just a swap with extra operations. See also the xor-swap.