Sort Detective - Solution

Stuck on that homework assignment involving SortDetective.jar? No need to worry! ☕

This tutorial is “certifiably” Mac Friendly. Whoop. 

Files Provided To You

• SortDetective.jar, which looks something like this: 🔍 zoom> The purpose of this little HW assignment is to correctly identify the 6 Greek letters (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, & Zeta) with their matching sorting method (selection, insertion, bubble, quick, merge, & heap sort).

Step 1 - Download JD-GUI

Head over to the Java Decompiler page located at jd.benow.ca) and download the ZIP file for the JD-GUI. 🔍 zoom

Step 2 - Launch JD-GUI

Now that you’ve downloaded the ZIP file, unzip it and launch the application. 🔍 zoom

Step 3 - Open your SortDetective.jar file using JD-GUI

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Step 4 - Find the Formula That Determines The Order

SortDetective.jar determines the sorting method ordering according to your student ID.It has an array defined with 5 different orders that the sorting methods CAN be placed in. See Line 256 in the SortDetective.class. 🔍 zoom Zooming in… 🔍 zoom With some minor searches, we find out that the method experimentOrders uses the variable selectedPermutation to determine what array value it will use to determine the order. 🔍 zoom This redirects us to the setStudentID() method. So now we’ve figured out the ordering all just depends on the formula the program uses. 🔍 zoom

Step 5 - Apply Formula To experimentOrders

So, in my case, my student ID is 00319124. Using the formula, we can determine that the value of selectedPermutation is going to be 2 for me since 319124 / 10 % 5= 2.4 or simply 2 for int. That means that the array value for experimentOrders will be 2, making a match to the order found on Line 7 when zooming in to Line 256 in SortDetective.class. Remember, arrays are ordered like {0,1,2}. So experimentOrders[2] would be the 3rd value in the array. 🔍 zoom There we go! Just like that, I now know for sure that the ordering of the Greek letters for me would go

• Alpha - Quick Sort
• Beta - Selection Sort
• Gamma - Merge Sort
• Delta - Bubble Sort
• Epsilon - Insertion Sort
• Zeta - Heap Sort

Good luck with your HW! 😉️