Bogosort facts for kids

The Bogosort is a very unusual algorithm for putting things in order. Imagine you have a messy pile of items, like numbers or cards. Bogosort tries to sort them by just randomly mixing them up again and again. It keeps doing this until, purely by chance, the items end up in the correct order. Because it relies only on luck, Bogosort is known as one of the worst and slowest ways to sort anything!

How Bogosort Works

Bogosort is super simple, but not very smart. First, it takes a list of things you want to sort, like a bunch of numbers. Then, it shuffles them all up completely randomly, like throwing a deck of cards in the air. After shuffling, it checks if the list is now perfectly sorted. If it is, great! The job is done. But if the list is still messy, it just throws the items up in the air and shuffles them randomly again. It keeps repeating this process until, by pure luck, the items finally fall into the right order.

Think of it like trying to sort a deck of cards. Instead of carefully arranging them, you just toss them into the air. Then you pick them up randomly. You keep doing this over and over until, by some miracle, they happen to land in perfect order. That's exactly how Bogosort works!

Steps of Bogosort

Here are the simple steps Bogosort follows:

• Start with a list of items that are not in order.
• Randomly mix up all the items in the list.
• Check if the items are now in the correct sorted order.
• If they are sorted, the process stops.
• If they are not sorted, go back to the second step and mix them up again!

A Simple Example

Let's see Bogosort try to sort a small list of numbers. Imagine we have this list: (3, 1, 5, 7, 8, 9)

Bogosort will start shuffling:

• 1st shuffle: (1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 5) - Not sorted!
• 2nd shuffle: (3, 7, 8, 6, 9, 1) - Still not sorted!
• 3rd shuffle: (7, 6, 3, 8, 9, 1) - Nope!
• 4th shuffle: (6, 7, 8, 9, 3, 1) - Not yet!
• 5th shuffle: (3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1) - Still no!

This process would continue for a very long time. It might take thousands, millions, or even billions of tries! Eventually, just by chance, it would finally get to: Sorted list: (1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Why Bogosort is Bad

Bogosort is almost never used in real computer programs. This is because it's incredibly slow and inefficient. For even a small list of items, the number of possible random arrangements is huge. Finding the correct one by pure luck can take an extremely long time, much longer than the age of the universe for even a medium-sized list! It's mostly used as a funny example of what not to do when designing an algorithm.

Images for kids

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  Experimental runtime of bogosort

See also

In Spanish: Stupid sort para niños