Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are t

Can You Unsort Lists for Diversity?

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2024-11-16 19:00:07

Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many things you might want to maximize or minimize.

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Simple random shuffles often make people unhappy or work poorly compared to more complex alternatives, which break up structure in data.

If sorting minimizes distance in a list, then we might instead want to maximize distance in these cases. Can we define some generalization of sorting which is its opposite, an “unsorting” algorithm, which handles all these use-cases, from music playlists to video games to design of experiments?

No, probably not. (Although such algorithms—like Traveling Salesman to maximize distance—are probably underused in general.) The use-cases are just too intrinsically different, and in many cases, do not correspond to ‘maximizing distance’ or ‘novelty’ or anything like that.

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