"Creative" ways to determine if an array is sorted
Ruby
Everyone knows: sorting is very slow and takes many cycles (the best you can do is something with n log(n)). Thus it is quite easy to check if the array is sorted. All you have to do is compare the runtime of sorting the array and sorting the sorted array.
array = [1, 5, 4, 2, 3]

## measure the time needed to sort the array 1m times
tstart = Time.now
1000000.times {
  array.sort
}
trun = Time.now - tstart

## now do a reference measurement on a sorted array
array.sort!
tstart = Time.now
1000000.times {
  array.sort
}
treference = Time.now - tstart

## compare run times
if trun &gt; treference
  print &quot;array was not sorted&quot;
else
  print &quot;array was sorted&quot;
end