Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many things you might want to maximize or minimize.
Simple random shuffles often make people unhappy or work poorly compared to more complex alternatives, which break up structure in data.
If sorting minimizes distance in a list, then we might instead want to maximize distance in these cases. Can we define some generalization of sorting which is its opposite, an “unsorting” algorithm, which handles all these use-cases, from music playlists to video games to design of experiments?
No, probably not. (Although such algorithms—like Traveling Salesman to maximize distance—are probably underused in general.) The use-cases are just too intrinsically different, and in many cases, do not correspond to ‘maximizing distance’ or ‘novelty’ or anything like that.
But there does still seem like a “family resemblance” between these applications, and so I propose a neologism for all these related problems: “anti-assorting”.