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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Nearly every, that means with the exception of a couple, of the keep votes are SPA accounts. Delete !votes are based in policy while at least one remaining keep !vote is WP:ILIKEIT. Consensus amoung editors is to delete. v/r - TP 21:51, 24 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sleep sort

[edit]
Sleep sort (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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Absolutely no evidence whatsoever of notability. The cited sources are blog posts and the like. An amusing idea, but not of significance. JamesBWatson (talk) 14:34, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete, not notable, and at 4.133 billion years for a sort, it's unlikely ever to be notable. Hairhorn (talk) 15:12, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, Wikipedia is not a meme database. Lack of secondary/academic sources. Sasquatch t|c 16:27, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral, I heard about the sleep sort recently and it is a nice idea (although not necessarily practical). Original 4chan post seems to be from Jan 2011, but it's not until recently that reddit/hackernews picked it up. Now it seems to spreading as a concept on twitter etc, and google shows various implementations in different languages. However, until it's picked up by a respected authority on algorithms that can be referenced, the article is unlikely to remain.Alexs (talk) 16:47, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, I do agree that the use cases for sleep sort are low, and there are no real usages for it in the real world. I do still think that do not automatically disqualify the subject, look for example at Luckysort, that is a joke "algorithm" too. At least Sleep Sort do something/works. Maybe it will work well with a huge quantity of unsorted small numbers (millions, or more). I will test it and compare with Quicksort. -- Nsgb (talk) 17:17, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    You are right, it makes no sense to have Luckysort and not have Sleep sort. Neither meet the criteria for Wikipedia inclusion.
    Note. Other than this recommendation, the only contributions of this user are to the article Sleep sort.  --Lambiam 23:13, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep!, This article needs a lot of work but be careful not to jump to conclusions about its merit. The sleep time does not need to be a full second (it could be a very small fraction of a second), so it doesn't necessarily have to take "4.133 billion years." Additionally, there are lots of scenarios where the upper and lower bounds of the numbers to be sorted are known. Algorithms like bubblesort are rarely used in practice but are interesting enough to be studied and listed on Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Idfah (talk • contribs) 21:01, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, Encyclopaedia is not just for practical stuffs, but also things of interest like this article. Wingchi (talk) 22:12, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, I've made some changes to the article and while I don't doubt there is a lack of published research, in this case it's because the algorithm is not complicated enough to warrant research, not because it is "non-notable". In fact, half the sorting algorithms on Wikipedia are only cited in joke papers which exist to highlight their "insignificance", it's ironic that this is taken as evidence for notability. Red herrings like "4.133 billion years for a sort" are not useful either, particularly when an algorithm like bogosort which has arbitrarily large worst case sort time is somehow exempt from this criterion. 203.79.116.199 (talk) 22:18, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete – Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one day. The criterion for having an article on Wikipedia is not whether the topic is amusing, or has other redeeming merits, but whether it is notable, as evidenced by non-trivial coverage in independent reliable sources. In this case the sources have not been subject to any editorial control and thus are not reliable (in the Wikipedia sense); the main one is most certainly not independent of the topic: it is a posting by the inventor on a bulletin board. "Other stuff exists" is not an argument for keeping this. The statement in the article that this is a "sorting algorithm" is OR – whether the described process will produce a properly sorted sequence depends on unspecified characteristics of the computational platform, in particular the hardware.  --Lambiam 23:09, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one day is not a sufficient condition for deletion, and Other stuff exists in fact *is* an argument for keeping this, the article states as much: "The problem arises when legitimate comparisons are disregarded without thought because "other stuff existing is not a reason to keep/create/etc."" Lack of "notability" is regrettable, however within a couple of years someone will publish a joke analysis in some compendium and this article will be recreated even though nothing really changed, I'm loathe to have an article deleted because I can't read about the subject in the Sunday paper. Incidentally, your claim that calling it a "sorting algorithm" constitutes OR is itself OR, so long as the algorithm puts the elements in some order it has sorted them. 203.79.116.199 (talk) 00:13, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    There is no problem with OR inside an AFD discussion; in fact people are expected to research their claims in cases like this one. OR is an issue for entries, not AFD discussions. As for your main point, "might be notable in the future" isn't a reason to keep an entry. Hairhorn (talk) 02:33, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    The argument for deletion is, of course, the total non-notability of the topic, as should be obvious both from my contribution by itself, as well as from the essay "Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one day" to which I referred, not to mention the essential dependence of this article on original research.  --Lambiam 18:04, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, SleepSort raises some interesting questions and deserves to be listed in "Ineffective/humorous sorts" as much as Bogosort, Stooge sort, Luckysort or even Spaghetti sort. And the article looks well documented and critical enough --Goulu 09:43, 18 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Goulu (talk • contribs)
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. —Cybercobra (talk) 00:50, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong delete Classic example of original research. The claim "effectively making the algorithm linear time" is difficult to believe (sorting, in the general case, cannot be done faster than loglinear time) and, as explained on the talk page, wrong. This happens when technical articles are not based on peer-reviewed sources. —Ruud 10:38, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Many sorting algorithms are linear time, such as the counting sort, the pidgeonhole sort and the radix sort. The issue is that comparison-based sorting algorithms can't be linear. So this is not an argument for delete, rather "strong" delete. Rgiusti (talk) 10:56, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Those are not general sorting algorithms and only work for bounded integers. The "sleep time" is either unbounded or not an integer. Therefore the operating system scheduler will have to use a comparison sort. Therefore the algorithm cannot run in linear time. WP:OR was invented exactly to prevent the kind of argument we're having here, instead preferring the article to be deleted. —Ruud 11:05, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Algorithms are a subject of theoretical computer science. An operating system clearly isn't, and the properties of an algorithm are only to be determined by their theoretical workings provided that certain requirements (e.g. the possibility to fork an arbitrary amount of processes and "sleep"ing for a determined amount of time) are given. Therfore, your argument is void. --Natanji (talk) 11:14, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Then let's wait for the theoretical computer scientists to publish a few papers on this algorithm. In the mean time, it should not be here. —Ruud 11:28, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The article pretty clearly states at the beginning of the analysis, "Assuming the sleep operation takes constant time", and then goes on to give a case where this is true (n interrupt timers), in which case the algorithm is pretty obviously linear time. 203.79.116.199 (talk) 12:43, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, this algorithm is not only interesting, but may serve as a great example for why a lower complexity of an algorithm does not mean that it is faster for any practical use case. --Natanji (talk) 11:14, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Good example of why the article should be deleted. It has apparently mislead you into believing the algorithm has lower complexity. Any practical implementation, as given in the "Examples" section for example, will run in loglinear time or worse. Linear time can only be achieved using some theoretical oracle, whcih effectively does the sorting for you, or using special hardware and then still only approximately. None of this is discussed in the article, but quite essential for a correct and non-misleading description. We cannot do that however, because there are no reliable sources discussing these points. —Ruud 11:28, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
All of the issues you raise are discussed in the article, and from my reading you actually agree with his point (which is correct). The algorithm is theoretically interesting but practically quite silly- this is an argument to keep it not throw it away (Otherwise we would really only need three sorting algorithms on Wikipedia). 203.79.116.199 (talk) 12:43, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No, these issues are not discussed in sufficient detail. No, they cannot be added, as neither you nor I are reliable sources per Wikipedia's standards. No, I do not agree with Natanji. Sleep sort is just a poorly specified insertion sort where sleep is a blackbox insert operation. We might just as well claim insertion sort runs in linear time under the, practically absurd, assumption that the in insert operation runs in constant time. —Ruud 15:29, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry but that comparison is complete nonsense. If it doesn't meet some arbitrary notability level that is fine, however someone having a fundamental misunderstanding of an algorithm is not a good justification for removing it (see: 4.133 billion years, "not linear time", "like insertion sort except not", etc...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.79.116.199 (talk) 15:45, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is the topic is original research. This implies I cannot point you to any reliable sources to help you correct your misunderstanding of the algorithm. To prevent the endless and pointless discussion that will unfold in such a scenario, all articles on which no reliable sources exists will be deleted. —Ruud 15:51, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as WP:OR or entirely based on unreliable sources, such as 4chan, take your pick. FuFoFuEd (talk) 19:02, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, The "Sleep sort" is maybe not efficient and just a theoretical concept, but it show that another way of thinking to sort a list exists. And a person who eared about this idea must be interested to know they history — StreakyCobra (talk) 13:13, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Note. This user has no other contributions besides this "vote".  --Lambiam 15:16, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Note. This user thinks the number of contributions of another user has any kind of influence on how serious their argument is to be taken, and also seems to believe that deletion of articles is "voted" on here on Wikipedia. Both beliefs are utterly false, of course. --Natanji (talk) 21:31, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    I wrote "vote", between scare quotes, simply because the edit summary stated "Added my vote". I find it further remarkable when a new user's very first edit to Wikipedia is a !vote in an AfD discussion. In any case, the argument presented is thoroughly irrelevant to the question whether the topic is notable, and would remain just as irrelevant if the user was Jimbo Wales.  --Lambiam 00:03, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Response. It is my first contribution to Wikipedia, and I think everyone have had a first contribution. That can explain my misunderstanding between "vote" and "opinion" in my edition summary. But as said before, I believe this must not influence the serious of my arguments. —StreakyCobra (talk) 15:23, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Dlete. Probably a totally impractical idea but that is irrelevant - the test here is evidence of notability, which it fails. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 19:49, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, The simplistic implementation makes it quite friendly and interesting to study. It is also a very good tool when studying/testing scheduler behaviour. I can think of many other examples when this algorithm may come to use other than sorting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Erik.lonroth (talk • contribs) 07:23, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • So write a paper about it. It's not the purpose of Wikipedia to publish algorithms not published in venues considered reliable for this type of work, and 4chan is not one considered reliable. Just look at this article and its talk page: it's full of opinions of random geeks many of whom have made no edits to other Wikipedia articles. And they don't even agree with each other. This is why reliable sources are needed, which for algorithms almost always means academic sources like books by well-known academic publishers and authors or at least peer-reviewed papers, but even those are alone are considered insufficient as WP:PRIMARY sources; see shortest shared path problem for an example of that. This article (Sleep sort) doesn't even have that kind of primary sources. It has zero reliable sources, and that's why it should certainly be deleted. FuFoFuEd (talk) 12:00, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, I completely disagree that this is not a notable sorting algorithm. The cited sources being "blog posts and the like" even implies that there are significant sources that are not just blog posts. Just because there exist sources that are blog posts is not a grounds for deletion. 94.212.43.20 (talk) 09:32, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    You claim that the existence of unreliable sources implies the existence of reliable sources. I can't quite follow the logic of that, but pray tell us, where can we find these reliable sources?  --Lambiam 09:59, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, have you no soul?? Motti (talk) 09:11, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Not notable. (No, Motti, we have no soul[citation needed] ) Stuartyeates (talk) 10:05, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, not notable. If it was significant, would have appeared in reliable sources. Someone who cares about it might move to their sandbox or better yet keep it in blogs. W Nowicki (talk) 16:11, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete, it's basically a twisted implementation of Selection sort which uses a different (and less effective) way of finding the smallest variable. I'm also fairly sure that the complexity class is wrong, as finding the place for a single variable (assuming all are unique) requires n timers to be decremented (possibly less, if implemented well, but doesn't matter asymptotically) arbitrarily many times, depending on the input. I think it's polynomial, not linear. Possibly notable as an Internet phenomenon, or if Donald Knuth jokes about it or anything. 212.68.15.66 (talk) 06:48, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, Because you editors keep behaving as nazis. I am a German citizen and when I was a young boy watched books being burned. You delete article of programming language because they are "not notable". By your definition, "Puff Daddy" are "not notable" to me. I should propose to delete their article. There is nothing wrong with information. You are nazis. To hell with you. 79.169.56.225 (talk) 11:58, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • This is not a programming language, it's a sorting algorithm. There are infinite possible sorting algorithms. By your reasoning, Wikipedians are nazis because we don't have articles on Hyperzamoan Vectoroid Sort, Rambo-JamesBond-Übersort and the Swedish Salad Sårt, and countless other yet-to-be figured abysmally ineffiecent and complex sorting algorithms with silly names. Please be polite instead of calling people nazis. 212.68.15.66 (talk) 12:06, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • Being my age, you confuse quite lot. You had a person called Chris that removed several programming languages because they were "not notable". You people say you want to spread information but instead you remove information.79.169.56.225 (talk) 08:41, 24 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Wow, you (79) were there at the Nazi book burnings, old enough to remember them? Then you must be in your late 80s or early 90s. Here we play it by our rules; if you don't like them you are welcome to set up your own website to which anyone can indiscriminately add unreliable information without risk of it getting deleted.  --Lambiam 15:06, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, great joke but original research. — Arkanosis ✉ 14:01, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This is a valid sorting algorithm worthy of a proper analysis as given here. I posit that analysis of this algorithm is not so difficult as to constitute original research per WP:CALC. We may decide in time that this article should be kept or deleted, but I think it's much to early to make a reasoned call. It really depends on if this algorithm becomes established as an example of how sorting may be done. Check back in 5 years. -- ke4roh (talk) 16:04, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Depends on what? Wikipedia popularizing it? Why don't you come back in 5 years with some references. FuFoFuEd (talk) 17:40, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • How do you know this is a "valid sorting algorithm"? I think it's not a sorting algorithm at all. If you read the talk page, you can see this is a hopeless case for applying WP:CALC. Just check for a second what you are left with if all challenged and not properly sourced claims are deleted from the article, as they should be.  --Lambiam 19:38, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong delete. There are millions of sorting algorithms that work, and nothing is presented that makes this one more special than other grossly ineffiecent algorithms. I don't believe that sleep sort runs in linear time, and since there's no reliable source doing so I don't feel obliged to either. Basically, this is an Internet meme, until some professional, reliable source picks this algorithm up. Zakhalesh (talk) 16:24, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment/Delete. It is hard to say the subject is non-notable given Google claims 133,000 hits. However, most of the article content is in fact original research. For example, the article has a linear complexity only if you assume that the counters are decrementing all in parallel. However, complexity for practical algorithms is generally given for a deterministic Turing machine (or a probabilistic one) (and it that case the algorithm has quadratic complexity). It would probably be worth a mention if we had an article on esoteric sorting algorithms or, as 212.68.15.66 rightfully pointed out, maybe described somewhere as an Internet phenomenon, but as an article it's hardly keepable. I must agree it is funny, though. Nageh (talk) 19:48, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Only a small minority of the 133000 Google hits refer to this. For example, there is one that contains the text "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep...sort of", and another that contains "I mean, not as I am now, but really not sleep. Sort of like the Platonic ideal", and one that says "team sleep sort of bores me in general", and "Problem is my dog (a standard poodle puppy) likes to sleep sort of right behind the back seat". Google does a very good job of sorting its hits into order for relevance, so that the first few dozen hits mostly relate to this topic, but further down the list you reach a point where all of the hits are completely irrelevant, so the figure of 133000 is totally misleading. And of course, this is before we even consider the nature of the sources, and whether they are reliable. A large number of Google hits proves nothing at all: only looking at the contents of the pages that are hit can give any useful evidence. JamesBWatson (talk) 13:20, 23 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, although mildly entertaining and educational, not notable with no peer reviewed references. Even the educational value is minimal, as I can think of countless other text book exercises that would provide equal if not more educational value.Bill C. Riemers, PhD. (talk) 13:20, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Ideally what should be done, is all these 'joke' algorithms should be merged into one article. While I don't feel any of them are significant enough to justify an article on there own. They are probably worth a footnote on a description of sorting algorithms.Bill C. Riemers, PhD. (talk) 14:15, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • This article has been tagged for Rescue [1] by a new user with no other edits ever.[2] What are the chances of someone's first time on Wikipedia, being that? In the AFD we have IP addresses and users who have no other edits other than there or in the article, as well as some who haven't edited in over a year, and never worked on that article, now doing a single edit to say Keep, and nothing else. Seems a bit suspicious. How many people came here because of 4chan? Is this a joke? All references in the article now are links to forums where anyone can post. Dream Focus 13:54, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • I agree that the rescue tagging seems a bit odd, and it's probably misplaced as well - this article has already been subject to a lot of attention and attempts to source. Zakhalesh (talk) 17:01, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. This is a joke WP:MADEUP WP:OR but not one that's actually notable under WP:GNG, unlike the famous comefrom statement. The detail that items are scheduled is irrelevant to this silly "algorithm" but the Rube Goldberg complexity is distracting: What's actually happening is that it just uses the scheduler to do the sorting. (Ignore races and imagine the granularity of the scheduler is diminishingly small; the scheduler still has to sort things into a list.) This is no different than building a wrapper around any real sort algorithm of your choice and calling it WrapperSort. There's a reason there are no sources to support notability. Msnicki (talk) 14:50, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. It's a good joke, but not really notable yet. While not relevant for notability, here is how the 'algorithm' cheats: The sleep operation inserts an entry into a data structure in the operating system, which tells the operating system to 'wake up' the process at a certain later time. For this to work properly the various entries must be sorted. In other words, each sleep operation basically inserts its argument into a sorted table. Therefore sleep sort is just a cleverly hidden form of insertion sort – or something similar, depending on the precise implementation in the operating system. The assumption that the sleep instruction takes constant time is where the complexity calculation probably goes wrong on typical systems. On other systems it may essentially be equivalent to an algorithm described in chapter 1 of Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. (I do not know if it has a name. The idea is to represent each possible member of the set of numbers to be sorted by a bit, then successively set those bits in the set to 1, and then read of the sorted list from the 1s.) Hans Adler 23:05, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Others agree this was just a joke, and not a real thing. Dream Focus 07:02, 23 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete No evidence of notability. It seems to have attracted a bunch of WP:OR too. Remove as internet cruft. Dmcq (talk) 08:32, 23 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have checked every one of the "keep" reasons given so far, and there is virtually no reference in any of them to Wikipedia's notability criteria. There are such reasons as "Encyclopaedia is not just for practical stuffs, but also things of interest like this article" (yes, but only for things of interest which have established notability); "SleepSort raises some interesting questions and deserves to be listed" (the fact that someone who chooses to edit Wikipedia finds it "interesting" amounts to no more than I like it); and so it goes on. Worse still are "have you no soul??" and "Because you editors keep behaving as nazis". We even have some arguments given as "keep" reasons which actually indicate that the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, such as "I don't doubt there is a lack of published research, in this case it's because the algorithm is not complicated enough to warrant research, not because it is 'non-notable'" (but by Wikipedia's criteria that does make it non-notable). Then we have "It really depends on if this algorithm becomes established as an example of how sorting may be done. Check back in 5 years", which is an argument for deleting it now, and considering whether to recreate it in the future, not, as the writer seems to think, an argument for keeping now: see WP:CRYSTAL. In fact there is only one argument for "keep" which makes any suggestion that there may be suitable coverage. That one says "The cited sources being 'blog posts and the like' even implies that there are significant sources that are not just blog posts". Firstly, it does not imply anything of the sort, and secondly, a mere assumption that there must be reliable sources (without actually saying where or what those sources are) is not verifiable.The conclusion is that nobody has put forward any evidence at all that there is any coverage in reliable sources. DmcQ's comment "Remove as internet cruft" just about sums it up. JamesBWatson (talk) 13:05, 23 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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