If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

If it uses recursion to do the inserts, you'd probably gain quite a bit using a non-recursive sorting algorithm. Memory allocation might also be a big factor if you're reading in the entire file into ...