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Conceptually, the merge sort algorithm consists of two steps: Recursively divide the list into sublists of (roughly) equal length, until each sublist contains only one element, or in the case of iterative (bottom up) merge sort, consider a list of n elements as n sub-lists of size 1. A list containing a single element is, by definition, sorted.
The term "ansible" was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World, [4] and refers to fictional instantaneous communication systems.[5] [6]The Ansible tool was developed by Michael DeHaan, the author of the provisioning server application Cobbler and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration.
The classic merge outputs the data item with the lowest key at each step; given some sorted lists, it produces a sorted list containing all the elements in any of the input lists, and it does so in time proportional to the sum of the lengths of the input lists. Denote by A[1..p] and B[1..q] two arrays sorted in increasing order.
If the running time (number of comparisons) of merge sort for a list of length n is T(n), then the recurrence relation T(n) = 2T(n/2) + n follows from the definition of the algorithm (apply the algorithm to two lists of half the size of the original list, and add the n steps taken to merge the resulting two lists). [5]
Ursula K. Le Guin first used the word ansible in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World. [1] [4] Etymologically, the word was a contraction of answerable, as the device allowed its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances.
A circular list can be split into two circular lists, in constant time, by giving the addresses of the last node of each piece. The operation consists in swapping the contents of the link fields of those two nodes. Applying the same operation to any two nodes in two distinct lists joins the two list into one.
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.
Speaker for the Dead is a 1986 science fiction novel by American writer Orson Scott Card, an indirect sequel to the 1985 novel Ender's Game.The book takes place around the year 5270, some 3,000 years after the events in Ender's Game.