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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 early two-subproblem D&C algorithm that was specifically developed for computers and properly analyzed is the merge sort algorithm, invented by John von Neumann in 1945. [ 7 ] Another notable example is the algorithm invented by Anatolii A. Karatsuba in 1960 [ 8 ] that could multiply two n - digit numbers in O ( n log 2 3 ...
Merge sort. In computer science, a sorting algorithm is an algorithm that puts elements of a list into an order.The most frequently used orders are numerical order and lexicographical order, and either ascending or descending.
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 ...
A polyphase merge sort is a variation of a bottom-up merge sort that sorts a list using an initial uneven distribution of sub-lists (runs), primarily used for external sorting, and is more efficient than an ordinary merge sort when there are fewer than eight external working files (such as a tape drive or a file on a hard drive).
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 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 ...