Less CO2 thanks to more beautiful algorithms German programmer makes his invention available free of charge

Jens Oehlschlägel is making his invention freely available: symmetrical design principles for algorithms that can cope with less hardware and all data while saving energy.

Six years of work went into the project. Why do you do something like this? “Everyone can make a contribution to the success of the energy transition,” says Oehlschlägel, “I admit: you can’t keep up such a long project without having fun”. He is giving away his invention so that the technology can be widely used and achieve major savings, and regrets: “It would of course have been nice if there had been a funding opportunity for such projects in Germany”.

Background: The beauty of mirror symmetry can be found in biology, engineering, architecture, art and mathematics, but not as a design principle in programming languages and algorithms. The database architect Dr. Oehlschlägel has been analyzing the history of sorting algorithms for 14 years and has compared dozens of old and new algorithms with each other because they cause high costs in IT. The founder of the greeNsort^® project discovered that symmetry can be used to improve several widely used algorithms, e.g. Mergesort, invented in 1945, and Quicksort, invented in 1961.

Munich, February 7, 2024