> “This thing might as well have been discovered 50 years ago, but it wasn’t,” Thorup said. “That makes it that much more impressive.”

this is so cool to me, it feel like a solution you could* have stumbled upon while doing game development or something

*probably wouldn't but still

Im most curiosity how the algorithm fulfil the "global minima" that djixtra guarantees. The clumping of front-tier nodes seem prone to missing some solutions if unlucky.

Additionally, the `n` in the complexity only matters if for the Dijkstra approach you actually need a frontier of size proportional to `n` [remember that for open-grid-like graphs, the frontier is limited is limited to `sqrt(n)` for a plane, and for linear-ish graphs, the frontier is even more limited].

Also note that the "sorting barrier" only applies to comparison-based sorts, not e.g. various kinds of bucket sorts (which are easy to use when your weights are small integers). Which seems to be part of what this algorithm does, though I haven't understood it fully.