Indeed, but I don't think that he ever made that claim? (By constrast, tilly (TTBOMK correctly) did.)

And neither will mine, always. Much of the time it does. But, even with the same inputs, due to the semi-random nature of the algorithm, it occasionally will give up trying before it finds the optimum solution. I've never seen it be very far away from optimum, but it doesn't always find it within the specified iterations bound.

But, given that it will most times partition a 1 million value dataset within 8 to 10 seconds:

Testing buk    with 1000000 random values in the range 0 .. 1e4 Differ
+ence:=     0; took 8.156250 seconds
[download]

Where a brute force solution for 100 values would theoretically take around 17 years*, the occasional imperfect solution is fair trade I reckon.

(*)I tried to use the same math to calculate the theoretical time for 1 million value dataset, but nothing I have access to can calculate 2**1e6 in a timeframe that I was prepared to wait for :)

• 2**100 ~ 10e30;
• 2**1000 ~ 10e300;
• 2**10000 ~ 10e3000;
• 2**100000 ~ 10e30000;
• So, by projection: 2**1000000 ~ 10e300000;

  Which if my sleep deprived brain isn't dissin' me, that represents something like 100,000 years of processing.

  Will I trade that for a 10 second response that's occasionally non-optimal. Sure :)