"But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards"
A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.
A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.
1. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc...
2. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document.
[0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been difficult.
It's possible the room is a faraday cage, but not likely.
Budget? Yes. I don't dispute that. Know what they're doing? Clearly they don't.
(Snowden suggests they don't and that they have some level of incompetence).
They'd search you going in and searchyou going out and probably observe you while you're there.
You should operate under the assumption that the NSA are not idiots.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/feedtrough_ns...
This is iust one example, but there are many more, of backdoors introduced by NSA into commercial equipment.
Radix sort doesn't require comparisons, instead you examine the first digit and drop into one of 10 buckets. You then recurse on each bucket.
I think that'd be less frustrating than trying to do quicksort on such a large pile.