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Stable sort algorithms sort equal elements in the same order that they appear in the input. For example, in the card sorting example to the right, the cards are being sorted by their rank, and their suit is being ignored. This allows the possibility of multiple different correctly sorted versions of the original list.
The first phase of patience sort, the card game simulation, can be implemented to take O(n log n) comparisons in the worst case for an n-element input array: there will be at most n piles, and by construction, the top cards of the piles form an increasing sequence from left to right, so the desired pile can be found by binary search. [1]
Finally, the sorting method has a simple parallel implementation, unlike the Fisher–Yates shuffle, which is sequential. A variant of the above method that has seen some use in languages that support sorting with user-specified comparison functions is to shuffle a list by sorting it with a comparison function that returns random values.
qsort is a C standard library function that implements a sorting algorithm for arrays of arbitrary objects according to a user-provided comparison function. It is named after the "quicker sort" algorithm [1] (a quicksort variant due to R. S. Scowen), which was originally used to implement it in the Unix C library, although the C standard does not require it to implement quicksort.
An IBM card sorter performing a radix sort on a large set of punched cards. Cards are fed into a hopper below the operator's chin and are sorted into one of the machine's 13 output baskets, based on the data punched into one column on the cards. The crank near the input hopper is used to move the read head to the next column as the sort progresses.
The best case input is an array that is already sorted. In this case insertion sort has a linear running time (i.e., O(n)).During each iteration, the first remaining element of the input is only compared with the right-most element of the sorted subsection of the array.
An analogy for the working of the latter version is to sort a deck of cards by throwing the deck into the air, picking the cards up at random, and repeating the process until the deck is sorted. In a worst-case scenario with this version, the random source is of low quality and happens to make the sorted permutation unlikely to occur.
In computer science, integer sorting is the algorithmic problem of sorting a collection of data values by integer keys. Algorithms designed for integer sorting may also often be applied to sorting problems in which the keys are floating point numbers, rational numbers, or text strings. [1]