Where does quick collide?

In geotechnical engineering, quick clay is a highly sensitive marine clay whose open, flocculated structure, once disturbed, collapses so that the material loses almost all of its shear strength and flows like a liquid. Rosenqvist's 1953 Considerations on the sensitivity of Norwegian quick-clays traced this to the leaching of salt from the pore water, which leaves the clay skeleton metastable and prone to sudden remoulding into a slurry. The word 'quick' here carries the archaic meaning of 'living' or 'moving' ground, as in quicksand, and such deposits are responsible for catastrophic flow landslides. The referent is a soil whose remoulded strength is a tiny fraction of its intact strength, unrelated to a sorting algorithm or the sensitive flesh of a hoof.[1]

Unit

The sensitivity ratio of intact to remoulded shear strength of the clay

Recovery means

Remoulded quick clay slowly regains some strength over time through thixotropic hardening, but not its original intact structure.

Measured by

Quantified by the sensitivity ratio from vane-shear or fall-cone tests on intact versus remoulded samples.

In computer science, quicksort is a comparison sorting algorithm that works by divide and conquer: it chooses a pivot element, partitions the array so that smaller keys precede it and larger keys follow, then recursively sorts the two partitions. Hoare's 1961 Algorithm 64: Quicksort in the Communications of the ACM set out the method, which runs in O(n log n) time on average but degrades to O(n^2) on badly chosen pivots. Here 'quick' means fast, not alive, and the construct is an algorithm. It shares nothing with sensitive hoof tissue or a collapsing clay beyond the word.[2]

Unit

The number of key comparisons needed to sort a sequence

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by average- and worst-case comparison counts and empirical running time across input distributions.