July 31, 2026
Flipping tiles, flipping opinions
A simple clustering algorithm for lists
Toy-tile brainwave sparks a nerd pile-on over whether “human-friendly” beats “faster”
TLDR: Cassidy Williams turned a toy-sorting habit into a simple list-grouping method and shared code for it, even though it’s not the fastest approach. Commenters loved the human-friendly idea, then immediately launched into the classic internet debate over practicality versus peak performance.
What started as playing with a toddler’s Magna-Tiles somehow turned into a full-on comment-section showdown. Cassidy Williams shared a homegrown way to group matching items in a list by repeatedly flipping chunks into place—basically a tidy-up trick inspired by toy patterns, then turned into code. She openly admitted it’s not the fastest method, which only made the crowd lean in harder. Because on the internet, saying “this isn’t the most efficient” is basically ringing the dinner bell.
The strongest reaction? A surprisingly passionate defense of human-friendly beats mathematically perfect. One commenter said this was exactly the kind of thing that makes sense in real life, comparing it to sorting student papers by hand: messy in theory, effective in practice. That gave the whole thread a charming “finally, an algorithm for actual humans” energy. But of course, the optimization brigade arrived right on cue. Another commenter immediately started dreaming about using giant parallel chips to make the process fly, while someone else coolly suggested ways to trim it down and basically said, in programmer-speak, “nice idea, but we can absolutely over-engineer this.”
And that’s the delicious drama here: Is the point elegance, speed, or just having fun? The thread bounced between wholesome admiration, nitpicky improvement notes, and the eternal coder pastime of seeing a playful idea and trying to rebuild it into a spaceship. In other words: classic internet, no notes.
Key Points
- •Cassidy Williams describes a list-clustering algorithm inspired by sorting Magna-Tiles.
- •The method repeatedly takes the rightmost value, finds the nearest matching value to its left, and reverses the sub-list between them.
- •The article walks through a worked example starting from `bgogbrbroorrgbgorrbggo` and ending at `bbbbbrrrrrrggggggooooo`.
- •Williams characterizes the approach as greedy because it optimizes the current rightmost grouping step by step.
- •She provides a JavaScript implementation called `cassidyCluster` and states that it runs in O(n^2) time.