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nytm-spelling-bee
Generate anagram puzzles like Frank Longo's "Spelling Bee" as in New York Times Magazine
For sorting, not really. The big development in compute power is parallelism. ips4o facto (https://github.com/SaschaWitt/ips4o), if you want to sort large vectors really fast it makes more sense to sort in-place and in parallel. Parallel in-place radix sort is also choice, but way less flexible than comparison sort.
If you are designing a sorting algorithm component for production, it is critical to take into account all the blips and wrinkles that real components will face.
But when you are investigating how and why your CPU has the performance characteristics it has evolved, all those complications directly interfere with learning. The goal here was not to make a production-grade sorting tool; it was to understand what affects performance, using the sorting problem as a microscope.
The method is generally useful. Some years back I spent months refining a one-page program[1] to generate a list of word puzzles. After the first day, the list of puzzles was of no interest, but refining the means to produce it faster taught me a great deal.
[1] https://github.com/ncm/nytm-spelling-bee