Overall, AlphaDev’s new C++ sorting algorithms are 1.7 percent more efficient than the prior methods when sorting long sequences of numbers, and up to 70 percent faster for five-item sequences.

Sorting out computing AlphaDev’s sorting algorithms have now been open-sourced in the main C++ library, where it’s available to millions of developers and companies.

The algorithm addresses something called the library sorting problem (more formally, the “list labeling” problem). The challenge is to devise a strategy for organizing books in some kind of sorted ...

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.