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A kind of opposite of a sorting algorithm is a shuffling algorithm. These are fundamentally different because they require a source of random numbers. Shuffling can also be implemented by a sorting algorithm, namely by a random sort: assigning a random number to each element of the list and then sorting based on the random numbers.
However, insertion sort is one of the fastest algorithms for sorting very small arrays, even faster than quicksort; indeed, good quicksort implementations use insertion sort for arrays smaller than a certain threshold, also when arising as subproblems; the exact threshold must be determined experimentally and depends on the machine, but is ...
If the sort key values are totally ordered, the sort key defines a weak order of the items: items with the same sort key are equivalent with respect to sorting. See also stable sorting. If different items have different sort key values then this defines a unique order of the items. Workers sorting parcels in a postal facility
A bidirectional variant of selection sort (called double selection sort or sometimes cocktail sort due to its similarity to cocktail shaker sort) finds both the minimum and maximum values in the list in every pass. This requires three comparisons per two items (a pair of elements is compared, then the greater is compared to the maximum and the ...
A sorting algorithm that only works if the list is already in order, otherwise, the conditions of miracle sort are applied. Divine sort A sorting algorithm that takes a list and decides that because there is such a low probability that the list randomly occurred in its current permutation (a probability of 1/n!, where n is the number of ...
Sorting a set of unlabelled weights by weight using only a balance scale requires a comparison sort algorithm. A comparison sort is a type of sorting algorithm that only reads the list elements through a single abstract comparison operation (often a "less than or equal to" operator or a three-way comparison) that determines which of two elements should occur first in the final sorted list.
Bucket sort can be seen as a generalization of counting sort; in fact, if each bucket has size 1 then bucket sort degenerates to counting sort. The variable bucket size of bucket sort allows it to use O( n ) memory instead of O( M ) memory, where M is the number of distinct values; in exchange, it gives up counting sort's O( n + M ) worst-case ...
Stable sorting algorithms maintain the relative order of records with equal keys (i.e. values). That is, a sorting algorithm is stable if whenever there are two records R and S with the same key and with R appearing before S in the original list, R will appear before S in the sorted list.