Obama: not bubble-sort

Nerds will find humor in this Eric Schmidt/Barack Obama quote about sorting:

Pretending to be a technologist isn’t always advisable here, but Obama gave a convincing answer on his visit to the Googleplex in November when he was asked by chief executive Eric Schmidt about “the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers,” a problem in computer coding. (Obama apparently had been given the question in advance and was told it stumped McCain on his visit to Google.)

Without missing a beat, Obama said, correctly, “I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go.” Then he smiled.

“C’mon, who told him that?” Schmidt asked.

(thanks alan)

February 11, 2008 #
7 comments

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6 Comments

  1. Abe
    Posted February 11, 2008 at 9:41 pm | Permalink

    Obama is SMART !!!

  2. Morocco
    Posted February 11, 2008 at 9:42 pm | Permalink

    NONE CAN ARGUE ABOUT THIS FACT, THE MAN IS VERY VERY SMART

  3. mary
    Posted February 11, 2008 at 11:29 pm | Permalink

    Have no idea what that means. I am rather interested in how Richardson got that super computer for his state days before he watched the Super Bowl with Clinton. Must check out NM’s budget.

    I watched a You Tube video some college kids posted when they met him and I thought he told them he was not too knowledgeable about tech stuff, but thought they could just txt each other the photo rather than have someone take the same thing with each of their phones. He of course did not mind waiting as the three were photographed a second time.

  4. Peter
    Posted February 19, 2008 at 7:33 am | Permalink

    What a relief it would be to have a President who didn’t make naive choices of sorting algorithm, eh?

  5. RogBith
    Posted March 9, 2008 at 7:14 am | Permalink

    I’ve been following Barack Obama’s evolution since last year and I am still amazed by his intelligence and his charisma. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was able to answer that question.
    After all, why not?

  6. Günther Gugl, Rational Graz
    Posted July 5, 2008 at 5:21 am | Permalink

    Barack Obama is a very smart guy.

One Trackback

  1. By 3by9 » Technology And The Election on February 18, 2008 at 11:31 am

    [...] putting themselves out to reach an audience is when Obama was asked by Google CEO Eric Schmidt the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers and the Senator said that using a bubble sort would be the wrong way to go, which made a million [...]

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