Which sorting algorithms produce intermediate orderings which are good approximations?
By "good approximation" I mean according to metrics such as Kendall's tau and Spearman's footrule for determining how "far" an ordered list is from another (in this case, the exact sort)
The particular application I have in mind is where humans are doing subjective pairwise comparison and may not be able to do all n log n comparisons required by, say, heapsort or best-case quicksort.
Which algorithms are better than others at getting the list to a near / approximate sort sooner?