The candidates who make it past the algorithm play a set of 12 short online games developed by Pymetrics, which specializes in game- and algorithm-based candidate assessment and matching.

The longest algorithm it produced was 130 instructions long, for sorting a list of up to five items. At each step, AlphaDev picked from 297 possible assembly instructions (out of many more).

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 ...

If you ever need to sort character strings stored in SQL Server fields, check out this demonstration of how to write a common sorting algorithm using SQL Server TSQL code.