Talk:Dutch national flag problem

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WTF? What is this article about? I expected to see the Dutch flag but I can't even understand how anything in this article is about just that... How about a complete rewrite to let people know what's this is actually about or maybe simply delete this page. Does anyone actually read this? 81.246.93.2 11:00, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes we do. It could be more helpful I admit. Edsger Dijkstra, a famous Dutch computer software theorist mentioned the "Dutch National Flag" problem which is where the term came from. The problem was - given some pebbles of 3 different colours in a line in random order (corresponding to the tricolour of the Dutch flag), can you come up with an algorithm to sort them into 3 segments of the same colour? Edgar proposed an algorithm which does just that. Since then, the phrase "Dutch National Flag" has been associated with this problem rather than the Netherlands flag. More detail can be found here:

www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeAlgDS/Sort/Flag/

Stephen Howe 22:20, 9 May 2007 (UTC)