Thanks for the link! Yep, I had a thought about the 1/f noise right after calculating the spectra above, especially because my original power spectrum slope calculation had an error and the result came out very close to that of the 1/f noise :) I had looked up if sorting can generate it, but nothing came up.
Were I still in academia, I would have been tempted to write a speculative paper resulting in cringy headlines like “Scientists solve several long-standing mysteries at once: the arrow of time is driven by the human quest for order and meaning”
The “mystery” as I see it currently, is the mathematical origin of the pink noise emerging from sorting.
Maybe I’m being dense, and missing the mystery, but I think this reference might be helpful.
https://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/40.php
Thanks for the link! Yep, I had a thought about the 1/f noise right after calculating the spectra above, especially because my original power spectrum slope calculation had an error and the result came out very close to that of the 1/f noise :) I had looked up if sorting can generate it, but nothing came up.
Were I still in academia, I would have been tempted to write a speculative paper resulting in cringy headlines like “Scientists solve several long-standing mysteries at once: the arrow of time is driven by the human quest for order and meaning”
The “mystery” as I see it currently, is the mathematical origin of the pink noise emerging from sorting.
The result you got is pretty close to the fft of f(t) = t
Which is roughly what you got from sorting noise.