I like the idea, but it has a couple of flaws. First off, it's quite possible for humans to give inconsistent choices, such that a>b && b>c && a<c. Obviously, such a set of choices will not give well-sorted output. Worse, it will cause a segfault with some perls. Secondly, it won't neccessarly give the same ordering that different pairs, or considering things in groups, would give, because humans aren't really exact in these things. Thirdly, in this purticular case, there's a fully automatic method you could use -- render the character to a bitmap of some sort, and take the mean color of the bitmap. (This has faults, though -- which is lighter, '-' or '!'. Since the bounding-box of the ! is tight, it's very dark. The bounding-box of the - is much looser, because bbs of chars are always computed as being a fixed height, so it's ratehr light. However, a human would probably call them about even.)

Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

In reply to Re: Really slow sort, but useful. by theorbtwo
in thread Really slow sort, but useful. by BrowserUk

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