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Merge sort is often the best choice for sorting a linked list: in this situation it is relatively easy to implement a merge sort in such a way that it requires only Θ(1) extra space, and the slow random-access performance of a linked list makes some other algorithms (such as quicksort) perform poorly, and others (such as heapsort) completely ...
However, different resources such as time and space complexity cannot be compared directly, so which of two algorithms is considered to be more efficient often depends on which measure of efficiency is considered most important. For example, bubble sort and timsort are both algorithms to sort a list of items from
For example, since the run-time of insertion sort grows quadratically as its input size increases, insertion sort can be said to be of order O(n 2). Big O notation is a convenient way to express the worst-case scenario for a given algorithm, although it can also be used to express the average-case — for example, the worst-case scenario for ...
Repeatedly merge sublists to create a new sorted sublist until the single list contains all elements. The single list is the sorted list. The merge algorithm is used repeatedly in the merge sort algorithm. An example merge sort is given in the illustration. It starts with an unsorted array of 7 integers. The array is divided into 7 partitions ...
Each has advantages and drawbacks, with the most significant being that simple implementation of merge sort uses O(n) additional space, and simple implementation of quicksort has O(n 2) worst-case complexity. These problems can be solved or ameliorated at the cost of a more complex algorithm.
The original merge sort implementation is not in-place and it has a space overhead of N (data size). In-place merge sort implementations exist, but have a high time overhead. In order to achieve a middle term, Timsort performs a merge sort with a small time overhead and smaller space overhead than N.
[1]: 226 Since this function is generally difficult to compute exactly, and the running time for small inputs is usually not consequential, one commonly focuses on the behavior of the complexity when the input size increases—that is, the asymptotic behavior of the complexity. Therefore, the time complexity is commonly expressed using big O ...
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.