Sorting for humans

If you are anything like me, you have at least once in your life tried to sort all the cards in a deck.

Which sorting algorithm did you use?

Well, humans generally use Insertion sort without even thinking. But the interesting part is that insertion sort actually works really really well, and is probably the best for humans.

You see, we can do mental work quickly, but moving hands is cumbersome. This translates to easy comparison and very slow swap/insert operation when doing it by hand. And insertion sort just fits into this requirement!

(VisualSort has a nice sorting visualization for comparison.)