I came upon a system that had an interesting sorting process. It could take an array of ~1000 numbers and evenly distribute them into 12 "buckets". I use the term "bucket" loosely because the elements sent to each bucket were filled in FIFO order. Then one by one, each bucket is reintroduced into the sort process and it repeats. After the third pass however, the elements in bucket 1 are all in order, followed by the elements in bucket 2 in order, and so on. So now when the buckets are emptied into the sorted array, they are all in order.

Has anyone come upon a sort algorithm like this? It's really not like the bucket sort because in bucket sort the elements are in random order. With this process, the elements in the bucket are in the order they were placed in the bucket (FIFO).

Any help or guidance would be appreciated.
TIA.