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In computer science, merge sort (also commonly spelled as mergesort and as merge-sort [2]) is an efficient, general-purpose, and comparison-based sorting algorithm.Most implementations produce a stable sort, which means that the relative order of equal elements is the same in the input and output.
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 ...
An example of such is the classic merge that appears frequently in merge sort examples. The classic merge outputs the data item with the lowest key at each step; given some sorted lists, it produces a sorted list containing all the elements in any of the input lists, and it does so in time proportional to the sum of the lengths of the input lists.
The previous example is a two-pass sort: first sort, then merge. The sort ends with a single k-way merge, rather than a series of two-way merge passes as in a typical in-memory merge sort. This is because each merge pass reads and writes every value from and to disk, so reducing the number of passes more than compensates for the additional cost ...
In the first segment, all elements are less than or equal to the pivot value. In the second segment, all elements are greater than or equal to the pivot value. Finally, sort the two segments recursively. Merge sort: Divide the list of elements in two parts, sort the two parts individually and then merge it.
Merge sorting is an example of divide and conquer, where an unordered list can be divided into segments containing one item and sorting of the entire list can be obtained by merging the segments. A simpler variant of divide and conquer is called a decrease-and-conquer algorithm , which solves one smaller instance of itself, and uses the ...
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 ...
Cocktail shaker sort or bidirectional bubble sort, a bubble sort traversing the list alternately from front to back and back to front; Comb sort; Gnome sort; Odd–even sort; Quicksort: divide list into two, with all items on the first list coming before all items on the second list.; then sort the two lists. Often the method of choice