The broader contexts could be this: look at this puzzle as a way for reinvent sorting as a delegation of operations (split + combine) instead of traditional "swapping" of values. As CPU arithmetic is faster then memory operations some real treasure may be hidden in this new approach.
That is clearly nonsense, as the results of performing the arithmetic still need to be written back to memory, so it's just a swap with extra operations. See also the xor-swap.
