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A kind of opposite of a sorting algorithm is a shuffling algorithm. These are fundamentally different because they require a source of random numbers. 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 popular sorting algorithm has an average-case performance of O(n log(n)), which contributes to making it a very fast algorithm in practice. But given a worst-case input, its performance degrades to O(n 2). Also, when implemented with the "shortest first" policy, the worst-case space complexity is instead bounded by O(log(n)).
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.
There are some problems for which we know quasi-polynomial time algorithms, but no polynomial time algorithm is known. Such problems arise in approximation algorithms; a famous example is the directed Steiner tree problem, for which there is a quasi-polynomial time approximation algorithm achieving an approximation factor of () (n being the ...
Example C-like code using indices for top-down merge sort algorithm that recursively splits the list (called runs in this example) into sublists until sublist size is 1, then merges those sublists to produce a sorted list. The copy back step is avoided with alternating the direction of the merge with each level of recursion (except for an ...
The next pass, 3-sorting, performs insertion sort on the three subarrays (a 1, a 4, a 7, a 10), (a 2, a 5, a 8, a 11), (a 3, a 6, a 9, a 12). The last pass, 1-sorting, is an ordinary insertion sort of the entire array (a 1,..., a 12). As the example illustrates, the subarrays that Shellsort operates on are initially short; later they are longer ...
In computer science, selection sort is an in-place comparison sorting algorithm.It has a O(n 2) time complexity, which makes it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar insertion sort.
Introsort or introspective sort is a hybrid sorting algorithm that provides both fast average performance and (asymptotically) optimal worst-case performance. It begins with quicksort, it switches to heapsort when the recursion depth exceeds a level based on (the logarithm of) the number of elements being sorted and it switches to insertion sort when the number of elements is below some threshold.