[joebob42]

Sorting is one of a few things that computers spend so much time doing, even a relatively small improvement over that state of the art can have a big impact.

On the one hand this means if you can come up with a better way to do it in some case that's awesome and could be very valuable. On the other hand it means a lot of people have thought pretty hard about it and the next improvement may be hard to come up with unless you pick a tight enough subset of the problem.

Definitely go for it though :)

[MrYellowP]

Thanks for your post! Let me explain my problem, which fits right to it. It works as an example, too.

So, in freepascal there's some subpar pattern matching/string search function. It annoyed me so greatly, I've started researching into the "state of the art" and apparently they're all crap. My fixed size pattern matching solution fits into less than 256 bytes, not counting setup code, which is minimal.

And here start the problems for me, because I have no way of actually comparing my solution to "the state of the art", because "the state of the art" doesn't offer me downloadable, compiled benchmarks I can just run to compare stuff to my own and learning a new language (like, i don't speak C and certainly never will), installing a compiler, getting through all the walls that inevitably be in my way to getting it to run, etc ... totally breaks my timebudget and thus I drop the problem.

Basically, what I'm looking for is:

Give me a problem that's worth tackling, with a defined set of parameters and a compiled solution I can compare my own against and I will beat it eventually. I've tried doing this on my own, but that's just a big no-go on many levels, so I'm dependent on someone handing something to me.

Like ... the QuickSort. I have no way of comparing my potential own solution against "the state of the art", which is - as far as I know - pretty much all that's holding me back.