Preference Revealer sorts a list of items by asking you to make pairwise comparisons.

Before you resort to this, consider how much time you'd save by using the ordinary human method of eyeballing your items together into a rough order and then refining with ad hoc adjustments.

Click [example] twice to see an additional example.
After inputting a list, click the "Generate custom link for sharing..." button for a link to a version of the page already filled out with your list. The results page has a similar button for sharing your results.

Inspired by Tōhō Sort.
Hat tip to pluffei for suggesting a general-purpose version.

Many thanks to Knuth for his in-depth discussion of minimal-comparison sorting in The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 3: Sorting and Searching. When Preference Revealer was made, Wikipedia yet had no page on merge-insertion sort, which Preference Revealer uses instead of merge sort (used by Tōhō Sort). Merge-insertion sort makes one or two percent fewer comparisons in the average case than merge sort, according to my rather hasty calculations.

Refresh the page to reset Preference Revealer.

Preference Revealer is on GitHub.

Preference Revealer by Xom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.