Barack Obama - Computer Science Question
weedipikiaCited 3× on HN, 2013–2019
comedy · general · 2013–2019 on HN
A one-minute clip from Barack Obama's 2008 Google visit in which Eric Schmidt asks him the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama answers that bubble sort would be the wrong choice.
Used as a joke or aside about bubble sort and as evidence that Obama was tech savvy, not as something recommended for its content.
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3 comments from Hacker News
I get your point, but why would you pick bubble sort? That’s one any engineer should be able to implement without any help. It’s the more complex/useful ones worth discussing. Even Obama knows this: ▶ this video
Bubble sort is never a good choice unless so extremely lazy or what to impersonate Obama...[0] There are dual-pivot quicksort, smooth sort (in-place, based on Leonardo numbers and takes O(n) time to process a presorted array and O(n log n) in the worst case, and achieves nearly-linear performance on many nearly-sorted inputs), TimSort (that's stable as plus). Morealso changing stable to unstable sort is usually a very bad move. [0]: ▶ this video
While I'm sure the President doesn't research all laws he signs, Obama is somewhat tech savvy. ▶ this video I wouldn't be surprised if he made the threat based on his own personal moral ideology.