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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.
A sorting algorithm that takes a list and decides that because there is such a low probability that the list randomly occurred in its current permutation (a probability of 1/n!, where n is the number of elements), there must have been a reason for the list's order.
Cocktail shaker sort or bidirectional bubble sort, a bubble sort traversing the list alternately from front to back and back to front; Comb sort; Gnome sort; Odd–even sort; Quicksort: divide list into two, with all items on the first list coming before all items on the second list.; then sort the two lists. Often the method of choice
A bidirectional variant of selection sort (called double selection sort or sometimes cocktail sort due to its similarity to cocktail shaker sort) finds both the minimum and maximum values in the list in every pass. This requires three comparisons per two items (a pair of elements is compared, then the greater is compared to the maximum and the ...
A sorting algorithm is stable if whenever there are two records R and S with the same key, and R appears before S in the original list, then R will always appear before S in the sorted list. When equal elements are indistinguishable, such as with integers, or more generally, any data where the entire element is the key, stability is not an issue.
Their description of the algorithm used pencil and paper; a table of random numbers provided the randomness. The basic method given for generating a random permutation of the numbers 1 through N goes as follows: Write down the numbers from 1 through N. Pick a random number k between one and the number of unstruck numbers remaining (inclusive).
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See also mw:Help:Sorting#Specifying a sort key. If you have a list where all the entries start with quotes ("), and you want to set a sort key for one of the entries, then you will need to use the HTML name or number for quotes at the beginning of that sort key (see also List of XML and HTML character entity references § Character entity ...