The algorithm addresses something called the library sorting problem (more formally, the “list labeling” problem). The challenge is to devise a strategy for organizing books in some kind of sorted ...

When asked to create a sorting algorithm, AlphaDev came up with one that was 70 per cent faster than the best for lists of five pieces of data and 1.7 per cent faster for lists of over 250,000 items.

Sorting is so basic that algorithms are built into most standard libraries for programming languages. And, in the case of the C++ library used with the LLVM compiler, the code hasn't been touched ...