It’s useful to have AI come up with a new sorting algorithm; it’s a much bigger deal to build an AI that can learn how to write state-of-the-art code across a variety of tasks, he says.

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal.

While all sorting algorithms take longer to complete the more elements that must be sorted, some are slower than others.

Red highlights the path taken to sort the example sequence (8, 6, 7, 2). b, Mankowitz and colleagues’ algorithm generated a different procedure — incrementally sorting sequences of length four ...