Bogosort

The well known Bogosort sorting algorithm for JavaScript

The algorithm

Bogosort, also known as Monkeysort or Stupidsort is a quite simple sorting algorithm rarely used in production.

The idea is to shuffle a collection as long as it is not sorted.

// Input: Array
while( !sorted(Array) )
    shuffle(Array)

Shuffle

Bogosort uses a modern variant of the Fisher-Yates shuffle, also known as the Durstenfeld shuffle algorithm. It also relies on the broken Math.random().

// Input: Array of length n
for i from n − 1 to 1 do
    j = random from 0 to i
    exchange a[j] and a[i]

API

Bogosort is exposed via Universal Module Definition (UMD). Thus, you can use it in your browser, in a require.js environment as well as in node or any bundled project. At also comes with a minified version and a source map.

Bogosort exposes a function bogosort() that takes an array of numbers and returns a sorted copy of it. The original array will not be mutated.

var bogosort = require('bogosort');

var sorted = bogosort([6, 3, -1, 19, 33, 12]);

The bogosort() function also has a function property bogosort.measure() that returns an object containing the sorted collection as well as number of rounds it took to sort it.

var bogosort = require('bogosort');

var sorted = bogosort.measure([8, 3, 99, -12, -4, 8, 9, 11, 183, 12, 33]);

console.log('Sorted collection: ', sorted.result);
console.log('Rounds it took: ', sorted.rounds);

The example.js file contains an example of that.

Building it

To build it yourself just checkout the repository and run npm install. All important commands are run using npm.

# Run tests
npm test

# Run the example
npm start

# Build the minified version
npm build