Rainbow Sort Visualisations

[allochthon]

Really nice. The examples suggest to me that a lot of algorithms would be more accessible to people if they could be visually represented in some way. The timing is important -- the slowness of the bubble sort compared to the quickness of the quick sort gives one an immediate sense of why one would generally want the latter over the former.

[wollw]

I'm more interested in the visual aesthetic, but I've built a few sculptures[1] visualizing algorithms. It's something I'm hoping to expand on when I have more time and resources. I'd write a bit more about them, but I'm on my phone getting ready for work.

[1] http://wollw.github.io/Cellular-Polymaton

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N_smOznDDJs

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vbtvAQLDcrs

[lsjroberts]

This is a fantastic set of visualisations that was posted on here before at some point - http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.htm...

[izzydata]

Often it has to do with speed of implementation and a data set that is small enough for negligible difference. There is also an issue of whether the algorithm keeps duplicate ordering intact.

[bpierre]

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

[lolo_]

Dude, don't tempt me to add sound :P

[GhotiFish]

I'm seeing waaaay too much stuff happen all at once for quicksort. Frankly, most visualizations give you an inkling as to the logic behind an algorithm, but quicksort just sort of pops the field into the correct order in a blur.

Another classic sorting algorithm to visualize is heapsort.

[lolo_]

Try turning down the block size (the value that defaults to 20), that will make it far slower - try 5.

I know that isn't too obvious, but this was something of a quick hack :)

[saw-lau]

I love this as a visualisation. It would be great to provide links to the algorithms (if they were there, I didn't find them).

[lolo_]

Thanks :)

Full source code is available at https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/Rainbow-Sort, no guarantees as to quality... all (4 :P) algorithms are there.

[mistercow]

This is awesome. One thing I'd love to see is the ability to slow it down without decreasing the block size.

[lolo_]

Thanks :D

This was just a quick hack a year or so ago, am open to enhancing it though - feel free to post any suggestions over at https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/Rainbow-Sort/issues :)

[thedufer]

Interestingly, I just migrated my Sorting Visualizer off of GAE this weekend. Its kind of similar - more customizable, much less attractive: http://aarondufour.com/

[primitivesuave]

This is excellent and a great teaching tool. I tried putting something like this together a while back as a Java applet for one of my classes but couldn't get the color ordering function to work correctly. Did you use HSB?

[lolo_]

Thanks! That's very kind of you :)

Yeah indeed, well, hsl with varying hue and set saturation + luminescence - see https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/Rainbow-Sort/blob/master/....

I experimented with RGB and it really didn't work, HS(B/L) work a million times better. Took a bit of trial and error!

[y0ghur7_xxx]

remids me of this: http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/

not as nice, but shows different algorithms and their speed

[greggman]

Nice. Sorry for the self promotion but seemed appropriate

http://greggman.github.io/doodles/sort.html

click one for a larger version

PS: My method of cycle counting may not make any sense.

See https://github.com/greggman/doodles for details

[joshu]

The first demo of bubble sort made me think the bottom row was being sorted and then the rows above were just the previously sorted row.

I like Aldo's visualizations a bit better: http://corte.si/%2Fposts/code/sortvis-fruitsalad/index.html

[mh_yam]

I almost got a seizure x(

[reg29]

Indeed, there should be a warning in the title. This can cause seizures.

[TophWells]

Reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

Only more colourful and interactive.

[muffkin]

"what's this 20 do?" "I'll set it to 1 and see what happens" "oh" "." "." "." "no"

[lolo_]

Ha yeah, sorry about that! Quick hack, etc. etc.

[saxaholic]

Very cool! I second all the suggestions of adding more sorting algorithms. I might just try to recreate this myself in Processing.js...

[izzydata]

Cool, bubble sort at (1) froze my tab.

[lolo_]

Yeah, I will probably work on fixing that :) quick hack, etc. etc.

[pekk]

How many times do we need to re-implement sorting?

Why do we educate students to re-implement sorting again?

[dpe82]

Because sometimes it's important to understand what your computer is doing for you.