Jump to content

Quantum sort

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Weyes (talk | contribs) at 21:23, 30 June 2005 (condense). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A quantum sort is any sort algorithm that runs on a quantum computer. Such an algorithm could at best be linearly faster than any existing sort algorithm (if based on comparisons like classical algorithms), but no such algorithm has actually been implemented.

A joke

Quantum sort is also an in-joke among computer scientists, based on the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: You permute the list randomly and uses the outcome in the universe where it is correctly sorted (how to determine this universe is not specified, nor are the mechanics of the operations).

See also