The next lowest card will then be removed and held in the right hand, the 3 of spades. This then gets inserted into the correct position in the left hand.

Then finally, the next lowest is inserted into the correct position. This ends the algorithm as all cards are sorted. Looking at this real world situation we can start to come up with a basic algorithm to perform sorting.

The left hand will be our partially sorted list while the right hand will be our temporary holding bay for a record. We then insert the record in the temporary bay into the correct position. However, scanning over the whole list in each iteration is wasteful for a computer. A hand of cards is easy to see the lowest just by glancing. However imagine if there were a million cards to look at. The process of finding the lowest would be a mission in it's own right. As such we must attack the problem in a slightly different way, however a lot of the principles which were used in the card example will still be used.