thought: Will bucketing still help?

[sjmarshy]

I'm thinking that for very large lists of items, the number of comparisons could be considered 'optimal' in a mathematical sense but there'd still be a lot of them to make for a person. It would be very easy to get bored. If a list gets too big, bucketing could start to play a part. The bigger the list, the more buckets.

Start with two. If the number of comparisons needed for insertion would be above, idk, 10? start asking the user if the thing is in the 'good' or the 'bad' bucket first. Eventually, you'd have 1-5, 1-10 etc, and the number of comparisons would decrease while still having an entirely ordered list

I'm not sure about how this would be handled regarding the items existing in the list - it would probably not be best to make too many assumptions, but it's possible that some heuristic could be worked out for a quick conversion and then the user could make adjustments over time