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You can see hashing optimizations as well https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sort..., https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/commit/74eee2aff683cc7d...
I was one of the members who reviewed expertly what has been done both in sorting and hashing. Overall it's more about assembly, finding missed compiler optimizations and balancing between correctness and distribution (in hashing in particular).
It was not revolutionary in a sense it hasn't found completely new approaches but converged to something incomprehensible for humans but relatively good for performance which proves the point that optimal programs are very inhuman.
Note that for instructions in sorting, removing them does not always lead to better performance, for example, instructions can run in parallel and the effect can be less profound. Benchmarks can lie and compiler could do something differently when recompiling the sort3 function which was changed. There was some evidence that the effect can come from the other side.
For hashing it was even funnier, very small strings up to 64 bit already used 3 instructions like add some constant -> multiply 64x64 -> xor upper/lower. For bigger ones the question becomes more complicated, that's why 9-16 was a better spot and it simplified from 2 multiplications to just one and a rotation. Distribution on real workloads was good, it almost passed smhasher and we decided it was good enough to try out in prod. We did not rollback as you can see from abseil :)
But even given all that, it was fascinating to watch how this system was searching and was able to find particular programs can be further simplified. Kudos to everyone involved, it's a great incremental change that can bring more results in the future.
It is not the sorting per-se which was improved here, but sorting (particularly short sequences) on modern CPUs with really the complexity being on the difficulty of predicting what will work quickly on these modern CPUs.
Doing an empirical algorithm search to find which algorithms fit well on modern CPUs/memory systems is pretty common, see e.g. FFTW, ATLAS, https://halide-lang.org/