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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.

They started small, with algorithms that sorted only 3, 4, or 5 numbers at a time, but these are important because they’re used by algorithms that sort longer lists.

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).

Every algorithm has its own best-case as well as its worst-case scenario, so it is difficult to determine the best sorting algorithm just by its Big-O. Not only that, the amount of memory required ...