Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Merge sort parallelizes well due to the use of the divide-and-conquer method. Several different parallel variants of the algorithm have been developed over the years. Some parallel merge sort algorithms are strongly related to the sequential top-down merge algorithm while others have a different general structure and use the K-way merge method.
External sorting is required when the data being sorted do not fit into the main memory of a computing device (usually RAM) and instead they must reside in the slower external memory (usually a hard drive). k-way merge algorithms usually take place in the second stage of external sorting algorithms, much like they do for merge sort.
The merge algorithm plays a critical role in the merge sort algorithm, a comparison-based sorting algorithm. Conceptually, the merge sort algorithm consists of two steps: Recursively divide the list into sublists of (roughly) equal length, until each sublist contains only one element, or in the case of iterative (bottom up) merge sort, consider ...
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.
The algorithm is called merge-insertion sort because the initial comparisons that it performs before its recursive call (pairing up arbitrary items and comparing each pair) are the same as the initial comparisons of merge sort, while the comparisons that it performs after the recursive call (using binary search to insert elements one by one ...
Block sort, or block merge sort, is a sorting algorithm combining at least two merge operations with an insertion sort to arrive at O(n log n) (see Big O notation) in-place stable sorting time. It gets its name from the observation that merging two sorted lists, A and B , is equivalent to breaking A into evenly sized blocks , inserting each A ...
Batcher's odd–even mergesort [1] is a generic construction devised by Ken Batcher for sorting networks of size O(n (log n) 2) and depth O((log n) 2), where n is the number of items to be sorted. Although it is not asymptotically optimal, Knuth concluded in 1998, with respect to the AKS network that "Batcher's method is much better, unless n ...
Timsort is a stable sorting algorithm (order of elements with same key is kept) and strives to perform balanced merges (a merge thus merges runs of similar sizes). In order to achieve sorting stability, only consecutive runs are merged. Between two non-consecutive runs, there can be an element with the same key inside the runs.