While they all use different approaches, like divide and conquer or comparison sorting, they all have one fundamental aim: to sort random shuffles of integers into order.

In fact, “ 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes ” — created by Timo Bingmann, a PhD student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology — is one of the most weirdly hypnotic viewing experiences ...

In the former, a sorting algorithm repeatedly steps through a list that needs to be sorted, compares each pair of adjacent items in turn, and then swaps them over if they happen to be in the wrong ...

When asked to create a sorting algorithm, AlphaDev came up with one that was 70 per cent faster than the best for lists of five pieces of data and 1.7 per cent faster for lists of over 250,000 items.