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Stable sort algorithms sort equal elements in the same order that they appear in the input. For example, in the card sorting example to the right, the cards are being sorted by their rank, and their suit is being ignored. This allows the possibility of multiple different correctly sorted versions of the original list.
If the sort key values are totally ordered, the sort key defines a weak order of the items: items with the same sort key are equivalent with respect to sorting. See also stable sorting. If different items have different sort key values then this defines a unique order of the items. Workers sorting parcels in a postal facility
The ! indicates cells that are header cells. In order for a table to be sortable, the first row(s) of a table need to be entirely made up out of these header cells. You can learn more about the basic table syntax by taking the Introduction to tables for source editing.
The sequence of pushes and pops performed by Knuth's sorting algorithm as it sorts a stack-sortable permutation form a Dyck language: reinterpreting a push as a left parenthesis and a pop as a right parenthesis produces a string of balanced parentheses. Moreover, every Dyck string comes from a stack-sortable permutation in this way, and every ...
Finally, the sorting method has a simple parallel implementation, unlike the Fisher–Yates shuffle, which is sequential. A variant of the above method that has seen some use in languages that support sorting with user-specified comparison functions is to shuffle a list by sorting it with a comparison function that returns random values.
An IBM card sorter performing a radix sort on a large set of punched cards. Cards are fed into a hopper below the operator's chin and are sorted into one of the machine's 13 output baskets, based on the data punched into one column on the cards. The crank near the input hopper is used to move the read head to the next column as the sort progresses.
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 mathematics and computer science, the sorting numbers are a sequence of numbers introduced in 1950 by Hugo Steinhaus for the analysis of comparison sort algorithms. These numbers give the worst-case number of comparisons used by both binary insertion sort and merge sort. However, there are other algorithms that use fewer comparisons.