Gravity Sort : Is this possible programmatically?

Question

I've been thinking recently on using the Object Oriented design in the sorting algorithm. However I was not able to find a proper way to even come closer in making this sorting algorithm that does the sorting in O(n) time.

Ok, here is what I've been thinking for a week. I have a set of input data. I will assign a mass to each of the input data (assume input data a type of Mass and a type of Sphere. If we assume all objects to be perfectly spherical objects with shapes proportional to their mass, the heaviest one touches the ground first.). I will be placing all my input data in the space all at same distance from earth. And I will make them free fall. According to gravitational law, the heaviest one hits the ground first. And the order in which they hit will give me the sorted data. This is funny in some way, but underneath I feel that this should be possible using the OO that I have learnt till date

Is it really possible to make a sorting technique that uses gravitational pull like scenario or am I stupid/crazy?

Edit: Turns out all objects hit the ground at the same time hence I introduced the spherical object concept.

Answer 1

The thing is, though one of the ideas of OOP may be to model the real world, that doesn't mean there's a direct correspondence between how long something takes in the real world and how long it would take to simulate it with a computer.

Imagine the actual steps required for your procedure:

1. An object has to be constructed for every item in your set of data. On most modern hardware, this alone would require iteration and would therefore make your strategy O(n) at best.
2. The effect of gravity would need to be simulated, for each object. Again, the most obvious, straightforward way to implement this would be to iterate.
3. The time that each object lands on the surface of the "Earth" in your programming model would have to be captured and, via some implementation-specific mechanism, the corresponding object would need to be inserted into an ordered list as a result.

Considering the problem further introduces additional complications. Ask yourself this: how high up do you need to position these objects to start? Obviously high enough so that the largest one actually falls; i.e., farther from the Earth than the radius of the largest object. But how do you know how far that is? You'd need to first determine the largest object in the collection; this, again, would (probably) require iterating. Also, one might imagine that this simulation could be multithreaded to attempt to simulate the real-time behavior of the notion of objects actually falling; but then you will find yourself attempting to add items to a collection (an operation which obviously takes a non-zero amount of time) potentially at the same time that new collisions are being detected. So this will create threading issues as well.

In short, I have trouble imagining how this idea could be properly implemented simply using OOP without special hardware. That said, it really is a good idea. It reminds me, in fact, of Bead Sort--an algorithm which, though not the same as your idea, is also a sorting solution that takes advantage of the very physical concept of gravity and, not surprisingly, requires specialized hardware.