May 1, 2012

On efficiently pairing socks

Anyone who has done an appreciable amount of laundry has probably noticed the time commonly taken matching up socks of different styles and colours.

My efforts to optimise the process have led me to the curious practice of un-matching: making pairs of socks so as to deliberately not be a matching pair. It’s much faster, much simpler to compute and yet because there is a process behind it you have a defence against allegations of laziness.