I’ve become weirdly fascinated with BogoSort, the worst sorting algorithm ever.

What is BogoSort?

• Check if the list is sorted.
• If it is, return. Else, shuffle the list and go back to step one.

It’s fairly inefficient.

My intrigue began in an intro to Computer Science class, when discussing sorting algorithms. Someone mentioned BogoSort (or ShotgunSort as some call it) and I whipped up a quick Python BogoSort implementation.

Python

python main.py -n 10 -s
[67, 17, 36, 26, 59, 55, 33, 10, 20, 2]
[2, 10, 17, 20, 26, 33, 36, 55, 59, 67]
It took me 0:00:00.689806 to BogoSort this list.
I shuffled it 1,620,424 times.
That's 2349101.05 shuffles per second.

C

./BogoSort -n 10 -s
[5, 31, 79, 84, 0, 16, 40, 66, 30, 3]
[0, 3, 5, 16, 30, 31, 40, 66, 79, 84]
It took me 00:00:0.235736 to BogoSort this list.
I shuffled it 3,336,619 times.
That's 14154049.45 shuffles per second.

The C implementation is significantly faster than Python, but we all knew that.

Python’s BogoSort averages 235,000 shuffles per second with 10 items. C manages around 13,000,000 shuffles per second, which is 55x faster than Python.

With this information, I decided to write a BogoSort Data Aggregation Tool, which will collect data from repeated BogoSorts over a variety of list-lengths.

It’s called as such:

BogoSort -t 10 -e 6
// Will run from a list of 1 item to a list of 6 items, 10 times each.

where -t specifies the number of times to run each sort, and -e specifies the highest list length it will test.

When it’s done, it throws the results into a CSV file in the BogoSortResults folder, where one can analyze them using a spreadsheet program.

Which is exactly what I did.

You can find all of my code on my GitHub. Try it for yourself!