Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In computer science, Merge Sort (also commonly spelled as mergesort and as merge-sort [2]) is an efficient, general-purpose, and comparison-based sorting algorithm.Most implementations produce a stable sort, which means that the relative order of equal elements is the same in the input and output.
For instance, the array might be subdivided into chunks of a size that will fit in RAM, the contents of each chunk sorted using an efficient algorithm (such as quicksort), and the results merged using a k-way merge similar to that used in merge sort. This is faster than performing either merge sort or quicksort over the entire list. [40] [41]
External sorting algorithms generally fall into two types, distribution sorting, which resembles quicksort, and external merge sort, which resembles merge sort. External merge sort typically uses a hybrid sort-merge strategy. In the sorting phase, chunks of data small enough to fit in main memory are read, sorted, and written out to a temporary ...
A list containing a single element is, by definition, sorted. Repeatedly merge sublists to create a new sorted sublist until the single list contains all elements. The single list is the sorted list. The merge algorithm is used repeatedly in the merge sort algorithm. An example merge sort is given in the illustration. It starts with an unsorted ...
As another example, many sorting algorithms rearrange arrays into sorted order in-place, including: bubble sort, comb sort, selection sort, insertion sort, heapsort, and Shell sort. These algorithms require only a few pointers, so their space complexity is O(log n). [1] Quicksort operates in-place on the data to be sorted.
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 . [1]
k-way merge algorithms usually take place in the second stage of external sorting algorithms, much like they do for merge sort. A multiway merge allows for the files outside of memory to be merged in fewer passes than in a binary merge. If there are 6 runs that need be merged then a binary merge would need to take 3 merge passes, as opposed to ...
Block sort, or block merge sort, is a sorting algorithm combining at least two merge operations with an insertion sort to arrive at O(n log n) (see Big O notation) in-place stable sorting time. It gets its name from the observation that merging two sorted lists, A and B , is equivalent to breaking A into evenly sized blocks , inserting each A ...