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Locating the desired item in such a list, by the linear search method, inevitably requires a number of operations proportional to the number n of items, in the worst case as well as in the average case. Useful search data structures allow faster retrieval; however, they are limited to queries of some specific kind.
In computer science, linear search or sequential search is a method for finding an element within a list. It sequentially checks each element of the list until a match is found or the whole list has been searched. [1] A linear search runs in linear time in the worst case, and makes at most n comparisons, where n is the length of
Specific applications of search algorithms include: Problems in combinatorial optimization, such as: . The vehicle routing problem, a form of shortest path problem; The knapsack problem: Given a set of items, each with a weight and a value, determine the number of each item to include in a collection so that the total weight is less than or equal to a given limit and the total value is as ...
While doubly linked and circular lists have advantages over singly linked linear lists, linear lists offer some advantages that make them preferable in some situations. A singly linked linear list is a recursive data structure, because it contains a pointer to a smaller object of the same type.
As a baseline algorithm, selection of the th smallest value in a collection of values can be performed by the following two steps: . Sort the collection; If the output of the sorting algorithm is an array, retrieve its th element; otherwise, scan the sorted sequence to find the th element.
Linear search: locates an item in an unsorted sequence; Selection algorithm: finds the kth largest item in a sequence; Ternary search: a technique for finding the minimum or maximum of a function that is either strictly increasing and then strictly decreasing or vice versa; Sorted lists. Binary search algorithm: locates an item in a sorted sequence
The algorithm divides the input list into two parts: a sorted sublist of items which is built up from left to right at the front (left) of the list and a sublist of the remaining unsorted items that occupy the rest of the list. Initially, the sorted sublist is empty and the unsorted sublist is the entire input list.
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 partition contains 1 element and is sorted. The sorted partitions are then merged to produce larger, sorted, partitions, until 1 partition, the sorted array, is left.