>>> Of course pairwise comparisons produce a sorting; in fact, it's fairly >>> difficult to sort in any other way.
>> Radix sort. > radix sort requires that the individuals not only be directly comparable, > but can also be given a valuation in a totally-ordered positional system > (with known radix, etc.) My comment on radix sort was a purely pedantic response to the "difficult to sort other than with pairwise comparison" not intended as a serious proposal on how to get relative rankings on individual skill. > however, for the majority of situations where the bottom line is not so > clear, it's pretty easy to argue that by the time one has weighed together > all the qualities and faults of an individual to get a number suitable for > use with a radix sort, all the hard work has actually been done, and in most > cases done by means of comparisons. However, my mention of "bucket sort" was actually a more serious counterexample, and one more suited to how people actually do relative rankings. You can quickly group into large sized categories of similarly ranked items, then within each bucket do a more detailed comparison. This works for restaurants, wines, golf handicaps and so on. -- Charles
