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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

If, like me, you find photography of piles of sorted LEGO pieces hypnotically soothing, you will probably like this album I put together:

http://imgur.com/a/OJaq6

A while back, I sorted my childhood LEGO pile before sending it to my brother. 73 pounds of LEGO sorted by hand. I'm sure it says things about how strangely wired my brain is, but this was an eminently enjoyable endeavor.

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That's very impressive to do by hand, 10 Kg or so back into sets takes a week by hand, how much time did this take you?

Sorting into sets would be a lot harder. Just grouping by similar pieces is a fairly fast, automatic process. I could just sort of zone out and run on pleasant zen autopilot. I didn't need to keep running counts, etc.

I found that by looking for pieces with certain shapes, my brain/eyes would lock in after a little while and it got really easy to spot them as I sifted through the pile.

What I find is that if I look at them myself I tend to match shape and color, then I have to really force myself to look for the same shape in a different color. Very strange how automatic this is. It's like some subroutine taking over.

Yes! It did take some effort to untrain myself from matching on color.

Another one like that: Looking for a certain shape, being 100% sure that you have all of them, then you start looking for a different shape and you keep on finding that previous shape over and over again.

The album says it was about a week of work. It really is a very impressive album, too!

A week is insane speed for that quantity. That's day-and-night work.

Not that bad. Usually a couple of hours in the evening after the kids went to bed for a couple of weeks.

Did you use any sieves or other tricks to speed it up?

Nope. Spread it all out on a bedsheet and worked my way through the pile. I did (roughly) one category of piece at a time, starting with the bigger pieces.

Even more impressive. Large to small is exactly the right way to do it. You seem to have thought through the problem for a bit before embarking on it, almost every choice you made is optimal or near optimal to get this done in an acceptable time.

It's interesting how much you learn about how our minds work by doing a job like this. All kinds of insights into color discrimination, shape recognition and so on, as well as how much of a job gets pushed down to our subconscious once we've done enough of it.

Sorting things by hand is very relaxing and built in to us humans. I sort perls with my daughter when we make those perl-plates that you can melt with a hot iron. Or puzzle pieces, lego, whatever:)

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