Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Sorting algorithms are prevalent in introductory computer science classes, where the abundance of algorithms for the problem provides a gentle introduction to a variety of core algorithm concepts, such as big O notation, divide-and-conquer algorithms, data structures such as heaps and binary trees, randomized algorithms, best, worst and average ...
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 ...
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.
The next pass, 3-sorting, performs insertion sort on the three subarrays (a 1, a 4, a 7, a 10), (a 2, a 5, a 8, a 11), (a 3, a 6, a 9, a 12). The last pass, 1-sorting, is an ordinary insertion sort of the entire array (a 1,..., a 12). As the example illustrates, the subarrays that Shellsort operates on are initially short; later they are longer ...
A well-known lower bound for unstructured sorting, in the decision tree model, is based on the factorial number of sorted orders that an unstructured list may have. Because each comparison can at best reduce the number of possible orderings by a factor of two, sorting requires a number of comparisons at least equal to the binary logarithm of ...
Richard Cole and David C. Kandathil, in 2004, discovered a one-parameter family of sorting algorithms, called partition sorts, which on average (with all input orderings equally likely) perform at most + comparisons (close to the information theoretic lower bound) and () operations; at worst they perform () comparisons (and also ...
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.
Example C-like code using indices for top-down merge sort algorithm that recursively splits the list (called runs in this example) into sublists until sublist size is 1, then merges those sublists to produce a sorted list. The copy back step is avoided with alternating the direction of the merge with each level of recursion (except for an ...