Comment by DennisL123

6 months ago

Efficiency, not effectiveness. They are all effective in the sense that they produce sorted results. Even the non-modern sort algorithms are effective in the sense that the results are correct. This should be about the efficiency with which they do it, right?

From TFA:

The title is an homage to Eugene Wigner's 1960 paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".

Agreed. Effectiveness would imply that some algorithms are more likely to sort the list correctly than others, or they sort a higher percentage of elements. Efficiency is about factors external to the correctness

"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" is one of those titles that gets imitated a lot for some reason. Maybe even more than "Goto Considered Harmful".