08/16/14: Favorite Pokémon Picker, now actually a thing

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Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 08-16-14

Bulbasaur: I assume you mean a partial quicksort where the higher list is always recursively sorted first? I mean, I don't expect anybody to want to use the favorite Pokémon picker to actually completely sort the entire list of Pokémon.

Mostly I think that would make the favorite Pokémon picker a lot more boring - instead of being given a fresh batch of Pokémon to compare against each other, you have to compare every single Pokémon against some random one you probably don't particularly care about. But I also suspect it's not that efficient because you have to repeatedly choose a bunch of Pokémon that you know aren't close to being your favorites, just because you still like them better than the pivot. Remember, comparison sorts like quicksort are designed around the assumption that the only way to decide the order of elements is to compare two of them at a time. Here the comparison function is a human being, who is privy to considerably more information than just which of some given two elements is smaller, but quicksort has no way of taking advantage of this: it's optimized around doing a minimal number of binary comparisons, which is not at all the best way for humans to do sorting, especially on a list of items they're already familiar with and have some prior idea of the ordering of.

The favorite Pokémon picker uses a tournament-style algorithm with free multiple selection, which I believe makes better use of the human being in addition to being hopefully more interesting for the user. Already in the first round you can definitely eliminate way more than half of the Pokémon, while something Quicksort-like would be stuck with half on average each round.

[29/08/2014 14:57:12]

Bulbasaur
Commenting on: 08-16-14

Do you think that a quicksort would work better for the Pokemon Picker?

[29/08/2014 06:27:06]

CourageHound
Commenting on: 08-16-14

This is a really cool game!! I've been trying to find out what my favorite pokes are for the longest and this game(although arduous) help me narrow them down. :)

[19/08/2014 04:48:47]

Back Button
Commenting on: 08-16-14

Is it possible to make a back/undo button for the favorites test? I've had to reset several times because of accidental double-clicking.

(Alternatively, just blocking the double-click thing if multiple Pokemon are selected could work)

[17/08/2014 14:53:52]