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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.
Cycle sort is an in-place, unstable sorting algorithm, a comparison sort that is theoretically optimal in terms of the total number of writes to the original array, unlike any other in-place sorting algorithm. It is based on the idea that the permutation to be sorted can be factored into cycles, which can individually be rotated to give a ...
Pancake sorting is the mathematical problem of sorting a disordered stack of pancakes in order of size when a spatula can be inserted at any point in the stack and used to flip all pancakes above it. A pancake number is the minimum number of flips required for a given number of pancakes. In this form, the problem was first discussed by American ...
Bubble sort, sometimes referred to as sinking sort, is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the input list element by element, comparing the current element with the one after it, swapping their values if needed. These passes through the list are repeated until no swaps have to be performed during a pass, meaning that the ...
Selection sort. In computer science, selection sort is an in-place comparison sorting algorithm. It has an O (n2) time complexity, which makes it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar insertion sort. Selection sort is noted for its simplicity and has performance advantages over more complicated algorithms in ...
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.
Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 [ 1 ] and published in 1961. [ 2 ] It is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than merge sort and heapsort for randomized data, particularly on larger distributions.
Insertion sort. Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort, heapsort, or merge sort. However, insertion sort provides several advantages: