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Quicksort is a type of divide-and-conquer algorithm for sorting an array, based on a partitioning routine; the details of this partitioning can vary somewhat, so that quicksort is really a family of closely related algorithms. Applied to a range of at least two elements, partitioning produces a division into two consecutive non empty sub-ranges ...
Development and choice of algorithms is rarely based on best-case performance: most academic and commercial enterprises are more interested in improving average-case complexity and worst-case performance. Algorithms may also be trivially modified to have good best-case running time by hard-coding solutions to a finite set of inputs, making the ...
In analysis of algorithms, probabilistic analysis of algorithms is an approach to estimate the computational complexity of an algorithm or a computational problem. It starts from an assumption about a probabilistic distribution of the set of all possible inputs.
Sorting algorithms are prevalent in introductory computer science classes, where the abundance of algorithms for the problem provides a gentle introduction to a variety of core algorithm concepts, such as big O notation, divide-and-conquer algorithms, data structures such as heaps and binary trees, randomized algorithms, best, worst and average ...
A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performance in the "average case" over all possible choices of random determined by the random bits; thus either the running time, or the output (or both) are ...
The divide-and-conquer technique is the basis of efficient algorithms for many problems, such as sorting (e.g., quicksort, merge sort), multiplying large numbers (e.g., the Karatsuba algorithm), finding the closest pair of points, syntactic analysis (e.g., top-down parsers), and computing the discrete Fourier transform .
Since algorithms are platform-independent (i.e. a given algorithm can be implemented in an arbitrary programming language on an arbitrary computer running an arbitrary operating system), there are additional significant drawbacks to using an empirical approach to gauge the comparative performance of a given set of algorithms.
As of Perl 5.8, merge sort is its default sorting algorithm (it was quicksort in previous versions of Perl). [28] In Java, the Arrays.sort() methods use merge sort or a tuned quicksort depending on the datatypes and for implementation efficiency switch to insertion sort when fewer than seven array elements are being sorted. [29]