Imagine you have a vector with 2048 entries. The total permutations are 2048! Now you have a sorting network let us say AKS, the total number of possible results with nlog(n) gates is $2^ {n log (n)}$ and that is excluding the constants. Which is much larger than 2048!
So what happens with all these extra possible results? Do they give me a valid result? Moreover, if they are just several ways to solve the same permutation, which one is selected. And are they uniformly distributed???
Thanks in advance for any feedback