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Sorted arrays are the most space-efficient data structure with the best locality of reference for sequentially stored data. [citation needed]Elements within a sorted array are found using a binary search, in O(log n); thus sorted arrays are suited for cases when one needs to be able to look up elements quickly, e.g. as a set or multiset data structure.
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.
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.
However, the fundamental difference between the two algorithms is that insertion sort scans backwards from the current key, while selection sort scans forwards. This results in selection sort making the first k elements the k smallest elements of the unsorted input, while in insertion sort they are simply the first k elements of the input.
This order is usually determined by the order in which the elements are added to the structure, but the elements can be rearranged in some contexts, such as sorting a list. For a structure that isn't ordered, on the other hand, no assumptions can be made about the ordering of the elements (although a physical implementation of these data types ...
Such a component or property is called a sort key. For example, the items are books, the sort key is the title, subject or author, and the order is alphabetical. A new sort key can be created from two or more sort keys by lexicographical order. The first is then called the primary sort key, the second the secondary sort key, etc.
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.
Lexicographic sorting of a set of string keys can be implemented by building a trie for the given keys and traversing the tree in pre-order fashion; [26] this is also a form of radix sort. [27] Tries are also fundamental data structures for burstsort, which is notable for being the fastest string sorting algorithm as of 2007, [28] accomplished ...