"Writing the fastest quick sort in a given language is an exercise for fresh young brains."

I can't see the reasoning here. Surely it's a job for someone who has written previous sorting algorithms, understands the trade-offs between speed and memory, and understand the pitfalls that can be fallen into when sorting different kinds of data?

An experienced brain would look up the pre-written libraries, and use the best of those rather than writing his own buggy implementation.