I do the same thing and I buy socks in large batches replacing old batches. This is by far the best life hack I have implemented. My socks are comfortable, versatile and I never need to worry about pairing. I did this after literally seeing how my upright washing machine swallowed a sock between the drum and the drum container. I never took it apart to see how many lone socks are left there.
I do pretty much the same thing (although I have two colours :) Since you don't ever pair any of your socks the wear is fairly even since you are picking two random socks every morning. If a single sock gets a hole in it you just throw it out!
If you really had OCD, you would always do laundry, pull the contents of your sock drawer forward, put clean socks at the back, and only take socks from the front. Problem solved.
If you really had OCD, you would do laundry, wash your hands to avoid spreading diseases to your family, pull the contents of your sock drawer forward, wash your hands to avoid spreading diseases to your family, put clean socks at the back, wash your hands to avoid spreading diseases to your family, and only take socks from the front, after you have washed your hands to avoid spreading diseases to your family. Problem solved, if the problem has been washed, of course.
Socks that haven't been worn between the last time you've done laundry and the most recent time end up at the bottom of the drawer. So the worn socks get picked again and reworn before the ones at the bottom of the drawer. Then one week you skip laundry, everything ends up in the wash the next week and you realize that you have very different wear levels on your socks.
No because you bought them all at the same time and washed them all at once. And you did the same activity each day resulting in the same wear for each sock. If you're that OCD, you would.
I had this happen a few years ago, though in a slightly different fashion. The same "model" of sock was around, but the design changed once (width of stripes) and the material/construction quality changed several times. So despite having had ~15 pairs of the "same" socks, I still had to match because otherwise they would feel different on my feet. That's obviously not an issue in the grand scheme of things, but it bothered me :)
The idea is that I don't need to pair my socks. I can just take any random 2 socks from the heap whenever I'm going out, since they are all the same. Hence, O(1).
I thought about simply removing a sock from the pile and isolating it. One for one, maybe puting the man's socks on the left and the women's on the right.
So everytime you grab a new sock you can quickly check if you already isolated the pair of that one.
This way you just have to grab each sock once. (this is similar to the second answer, but no need to prepare a flat pile to begin with).
Yup. Unless you have millions of socks, you can afford to "hash" each style sock by color + pattern + size + whatever, rather than repeatedly into ever-smaller piles based on just one of the metrics.
That's actually how I pair my socks from the laundry pile, anything else seems kind of silly...
This kind of recursive hash partitioning is actually being done by SQL Server when it needs to hash join or hash aggregate over huge data sets.
My pile of socks is not a huge dataset. They easily fit on the seat of my couch when laid out in pairs.
No one owns enough socks of enough different kinds to make the accepted solution the most efficient.
It's much easier to simply try for a match on an unmatched sock, and if there is no match put that sock into cache (usually somewhere else on the bed). Your cache will probably never get above about 8 socks without a match.
"No one owns enough socks of enough different kinds"
Not sure if you're making a legitimate YAGNI argument, or falling into a programmer fallacy of believing you can safely generalize from your own experience to your users...
I'm leaning towards the latter, and am further going to suggest that your experience might be limited to being single, and likely male, and that it generalizes badly on any axis away from that state.
This problem feels like a surprisingly good example of how your personal intuitions about a problem space can lead you to make incorrect simplifying assumptions to find an elegant solution, that will completely fail when they run into the real needs of your actual users.
How many different kinds of sock do you own? I fold socks for four people - my wife and my two children, contrary to your ignorant assertion - and between the four of us we may have a dozen different kinds of sock.
The answer is http://www.bargain-bulk-sock-sales.com/ Get a gross of either ankle, high or dress socks. ALL EXACTLY THE SAME. When a sock goes bad, take it out of circulation and grab a new one from the box. I bought a gross in 2004 and I'm about 1/2 of the way through. So at that point it was about $90 for 10 years of socks with no time spent on matching socks. They all match.
I wouldn't pair socks, personally. I would just create piles and offload pairing to each sock-wearing instance. This becomes efficient by creating piles based on intended use, and allowing each pile to have easily-distinguished differences such as color difference or size. What's interesting is that your pile criteria changes based on your socks. For me I have a long-warm pile, long-cool pile, and short pile. But if I didn't have long or short socks i'd have to create new piles: dress, casual, athletic, for example. Another pile set might be long-short-dress, long-short-casual, long-short-athletic, or long-short-warm, long-short-cool, long-short-athletic, etc.
In each case, the pile has socks that are so distinct that it becomes trivial to identify a matching pair in the pile. This is also why I don't sort by color.
I fold each pair of socks into each other when I put them into the washing machine and then unfold them when hanging up to dry. All pairs stay together, no sorting necessary.
i made the 'mistake' of buying socks where some have a blue logo, some have a green logo, and some have a grey logo. I forced myself to be 100% color blind and mis-match the colors but consider that in my mind as a true match.
