Applying algorithms to real-life problem

Today I encountered a real-life problem. My wife got some fresh pecan. After we cracked the pecan and took the large pieces, there are some smaller pieces of pecan and shell fragments left in the bowl. My wife asked kids to separate the pecan from the shell. There were three proposals:

1) Pick the pecan out. The trouble is that we have more pecan pieces than shell pieces. The time for this approach is proportional to number of pecan pieces.

2) Pick the shell out. It is not clear whether the time would be small because we still need to scan (with our eye) among pecans to find shell. In additional, it is hard to be sure that we are free of shells at the end.

3) Pour them in water and hope one is heavier than water and the other is lighter. This idea was never tested.

Then I proposed the 4th approach: grab a few pieces in my palm and apply 1) or 2), which ever way is faster. This works out really well.

The key is that after I scan the pecan and shells in my palm I never scan the same pieces again. The fast algorithms, whether searching a word in a string, or sorting a list, or finding the quickest time when traveling from point A to point B, are all by finding a smart way to minimize the operations on the same data.