Karel Čížek: How to sort out your life in O(n) time

Why would anybody want to talk about sorting in 2016? It's an old topic and everything there's to know is already known. So why?

Because the world is going to end.

Well, maybe not the world, but there's another Armageddon on a horizon that will change everything: the end of Moore's Law. It has to end someday, but the end is closer than the most of us imagined in out worst nightmares. Some say it will come in 2020, others hope we will be able to hold till 2022. It doesn't really mater, the end will come very soon and we will be there, living in post-apocalyptic wastelands.

In a couple of years we might be in a situation where our resources are not growing without bounds. Days of exuberance and excess might be gone. What should we do in that situation? Perhaps it will be necessary to rethink efficiency, to go back to basics and to find out what's going on on the lowest levels of our code and what inefficiencies we were taking for granted.

And what's more basic than sorting? Hardly anything. It's an ancient art, mostly forgotten and lost in sands of time. But there's so much to know, so much to learn, so much beauty to appreciate, so much orthogonals, parallels and connections to follow. There's strange, addictive and ecstatic beauty in a world where algorithms and hardware meet, where asymptotes and constants clashes, where theory and praxis fights, where Tony Hoare's and John Von Neumann's immortal creations endlessly mutate to meet twisted realities of today, where big data burns on huge piles of silicon, where Stonebraker's databases reign supreme, where hot-headed PhDs spent their lives tangled in obscure proofs looking for linear time sorts, where wild hackers care only about counting cycles to get that illusory one percent performance bump, where progress leads through valley of damned, where fights are tough and Shannon rules over our mortal world like some vicious lovecraftian Elder God with indifference and malice.

So yeah, I want to talk about all that. It will be high speed, high power, high level, high octane talk that will do nothing less than recap everything ever written about sorting and that will be just the beginning. Then I will continue into areas of recent research of sorting, joining, discrimination and relation to the functional programming and mention 20 papers along the way.

Bio: These days the speaker is solely preoccupied by embracing the Absurd, expecting the Apocalypse with a stoic hubris and choosing the final one-liner.