That's because it always tried answers in the same order. If you tell it to keep going, it'll succesfully sort with http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4833651/javascript-array-... and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12137690/javascript-sort-... as well.

Those two don't work in the general case.

The first only leaves the unique members of the list, so you get a sorted set. The second sorts lexicographically, because javascript's .sort() method on arrays sorts lexicographically. This means that if you have a list of numbers like [1, 2, 10], it will get sorted as [1, 10, 2]. Unless you pass your own comparator in.

What this page really demonstrates is that there is precisely one answer on stackoverflow containing a complete generic sort function in javascript (quicksort in fact).

Sorry; I should have specified that I only used the example input.

Well, yeah... it's an algorithm. Hit "keep trying" (big yellow button) to find more results.

Or, fork it and play with the StackOverflow queries.

Yeah sounds like shuffling the result set before running might add a bit more spice to this.