Red highlights the path taken to sort the example sequence (8, 6, 7, 2). b, Mankowitz and colleagues’ algorithm generated a different procedure — incrementally sorting sequences of length four ...

Usually, we specify the complexity of an algorithm using the notation O (.), which indicate 'the order of'. For example, the complexity of sorting N numbers using the bubble sort method is O (N2) and ...

“Computer scientists use sorting algorithms as an example in computational complexity theory, which offers an abstract notion of algorithmic scalability,” Flach continues.

The longest algorithm it produced was 130 instructions long, for sorting a list of up to five items. At each step, AlphaDev picked from 297 possible assembly instructions (out of many more).