Bead sort algorithm, also called gravity sort, is a natural sorting algorithm. Both digital and analog hardware implementations of bead sort can achieve a sorting time of Θ(n)
; however, the implementation of this algorithm tends to be significantly slower in software and can only be used to sort lists of positive integers.
Read this article to understand the intuition behind Gravity / Bead Sort
This is a perfect example where a hardware implementation is better than software implementation contrary to common belief.
This picture captures the idea behind Gravity/ Bead Sort:
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://iq.opengenus.org/bead-sort/