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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.
Usually the resource being considered is running time, i.e. time complexity, but could also be memory or some other resource. Best case is the function which performs the minimum number of steps on input data of n elements. Worst case is the function which performs the maximum number of steps on input data of size n.
In computer science, smoothsort is a comparison-based sorting algorithm.A variant of heapsort, it was invented and published by Edsger Dijkstra in 1981. [1] Like heapsort, smoothsort is an in-place algorithm with an upper bound of O(n log n) operations (see big O notation), [2] but it is not a stable sort.
An algorithm is said to be constant time (also written as () time) if the value of () (the complexity of the algorithm) is bounded by a value that does not depend on the size of the input. For example, accessing any single element in an array takes constant time as only one operation has to be performed to locate it.
The first algorithm of this type was Fredman and Willard's fusion tree sorting algorithm, which runs in time O(n log n / log log n); this is an improvement over comparison sorting for any choice of K and w. An alternative version of their algorithm that includes the use of random numbers and integer division operations improves this to O(n √ ...
Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort , heapsort , or merge sort .
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.
Skip lists are a probabilistic data structure that seem likely to supplant balanced trees as the implementation method of choice for many applications. Skip list algorithms have the same asymptotic expected time bounds as balanced trees and are simpler, faster and use less space. —