Comment Re:Slightly faster, in some specific cases (Score 1) 51
The implementation may be more complex, but that's exactly the kind of thing that ends up encapsulated in a library once the implementation settles down.
What they've got here sounds likely to be an intermediate step. I'm reminded of Tim Peter's series of posts when he was developing what is now known as "Timsort". The implementation combines multiple sorting algorithms (similar to how this is combining multiple shortest path algorithms), and went through many iterations as it was tuned for various different datasets exhibiting different performance characteristics. This sounds to be at the stage where "it works better for these datasets, now we need to make it work better for *all* datasets". An important step showing that it's *possible*, even if not finished.
BTW since then Timsort has been further evolved into Powersort which has provable performance characteristics (and better performance).