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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.
In computer programming, the Schwartzian transform is a technique used to improve the efficiency of sorting a list of items. This idiom [1] is appropriate for comparison-based sorting when the ordering is actually based on the ordering of a certain property (the key) of the elements, where computing that property is an intensive operation that should be performed a minimal number of times.
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. This is generally not done in practice, however, and there is a well-known simple and efficient algorithm for shuffling: the Fisher–Yates shuffle .
List comprehension is a syntactic construct available in some programming languages for creating a list based on existing lists. It follows the form of the mathematical set-builder notation (set comprehension) as distinct from the use of map and filter functions.
The following is a bitonic sorting network with 16 inputs: The 16 numbers enter as the inputs at the left end, slide along each of the 16 horizontal wires, and exit at the outputs at the right end. The network is designed to sort the elements, with the largest number at the bottom. The arrows are comparators.
In C, the functions strcmp and memcmp perform a three-way comparison between strings and memory buffers, respectively. They return a negative number when the first argument is lexicographically smaller than the second, zero when the arguments are equal, and a positive number otherwise.
Bubble sort, sometimes referred to as sinking sort, is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the input list element by element, comparing the current element with the one after it, swapping their values if needed. These passes through the list are repeated until no swaps have to be performed during a pass, meaning that the ...
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 ...